Category Archives: Politics & Current Events

Tuesday Morning

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Lisa Roney

It seems a particularly relevant morning to revisit Melissa Etheridge’s song honoring Mark Bingham, one of the four men who are given credit for bringing down Flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania so it wouldn’t make it to the Pentagon. Mark Bingham was a gay man.

This morning we try to recover from last night’s GOP Tea Party debate in Tampa. Richard Adams of the Guardian provides a merciful summary for those of us unable to stomach watching it. You can scroll down to 8:00 p.m. when the debate actually starts. Gay rights were not discussed at all, as those won’t really become an issue until a Republican faces a Democrat. But we should all know that the Republican position on the issue hasn’t changed much since the 1950s.

Perhaps the most revealing moment of the debate came when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked candidate Ron Paul who should pay for the hospital care of an uninsured man suddenly critically ill. When Paul hedged, Blitzer asked if he should just be allowed to die. Several members of the audience yelled, “Yes!” There’s a brief video of the exchange here.

These people scare me way more than Al Qaeda.

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Where Is the Love?

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Lisa Roney

This is the Black Eyed Peas’ peace anthem, and it’s simple in its chorus, but one of the things I like about it is how it acknowledges the tangle of complexities we live with.

Where is the love?
I don’t know.
Where is the truth?
I don’t know.

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When New York Had Her Heart Broke (9/11)

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Lisa Roney

I have a friend whose birthday is 9/11. She and I have talked about how odd that is—to never be able to celebrate, as least not in public, the occasion of one’s birth. It becomes almost a secret. I want to tell her that we should never feel ashamed of being born, just as no one should feel ashamed of dying. So, happy birthday to my friend.

There is, however, both nothing and too much that one can say about the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I’ve already given the outlines of my experience of that day in this blog on the occasion of Bin Laden’s death. Saying anything today seems to me to take nerve, but it is probably nerve we need to have.

Philip Metres gives a good account of these conflicting impulses of silence and expression that face us over any such horrific event in his Huff Post article, “The Poetry of 9/11 and Its Aftermath.” His article also includes several poems related to 9/11, including Martín Espada’s beautiful “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” which ends with “Music is all we have.”

So for the next few days, I’ll post a song a day related to 9/11 and the dispiriting politics that have followed in the decade since. Just as George Bush squandered the world’s sympathy in his false claims of “weapons of mass destruction” and an ill-advised declaration of war on Iraq, our entire nation has squandered the feeling of brotherly love and egalitarian concern for each other that followed the attacks. Ten years after the 9/11 tragedy, that is a daily sorrow.

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The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Lisa Roney

Medieval man at writing desk; from Rodwell, G. F.: “South by East: Notes of Travel in Southern Europe” (1877). Public domain in the U.S.A.


Continuing on a theme of work this week, but closer to home, I’m thinking about layers of privilege. We think of class distinctions as being between people who work in factory, construction, and other menial jobs versus those who are in professions and managerial roles. But there are many class distinctions within the professions as well.

Recently, for a project I’m working on, I’ve been reading author biographies, and I revisited The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” issue published in June of 2010. The New Yorker publishes a summer fiction issue every year, and last year they chose to feature their top writers under the age of 40.

On the surface, the list is a paragon of progressive balance. Gone are the all-male, all-white lists of a few decades ago. A full half of the list is comprised of women, and there are 6 non-whites on the list. A variety of white ethnicities and persuasions are included, including at least 3 Jews. Several are immigrants or barely second-generation Americans. At first, the list looks like an ideal of the Melting Pot. Yet, poke a little bit and privilege raises its head again.

Of their 44 college/university degree admissions (a few of their degrees went unfinished), only 5 of them came from public universities other than the University of Iowa. These 5 degrees were: a pre-med degree at Peking University in China for someone who went on to get two master’s degrees from Iowa (an MS in immunology and an MFA); a bachelor’s degree from Eastern Connecticut for someone who went on to two graduate degrees at Johns Hopkins and Yale; a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida for someone who went on to go to medical school at Eastern Virginia, study at Harvard Divinity, and finally receive an MFA at Iowa; and two MFAs, one from University of California Irvine and one from Hunter College of the City University of New York. There were 6 MFAs from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Of the 20 young writers, at least 4 have either studied medicine or at some point been on a science track in preparation for studying medicine. Two of them have MD degrees. (Three of them have fathers who are doctors.)

I think the best advice I could give to those wanting to be creative writers is: attend Ivy League institutions, get an MFA from the University of Iowa, or become a physician. Unfortunately, you can’t choose your father’s profession.

Not that all of those who get degrees from Ivy League universities or Iowa or who study medicine go on such meteoric rises to fame as writers. And not that no one with a more modest educational pedigree ever succeeds. But statistically those things seem to improve someone’s odds significantly. I am happy to say that UCF (where I teach) has just sent its first undergrad on to the MFA program at Columbia.

However, perhaps, as I suspect, the key statistical factor for success is being born into privilege and/or to families that are highly educated and well-connected.

Of course, there are a couple of sort-of exceptions on the list—Philipp Meyer claims to have been raised in a “working-class neighborhood” by a father who was an “electrician turned college biology instructor” and a mother who was an “artist.” Wells Tower’s parents were both teachers, and ZZ Packer has noted that her father owned a bar and her mother worked in a clerical or administrative job for the Social Security Administration, and that her opportunities came in a school program that recruited minority students into top universities.

A few others seem to be fairly elusive about their backgrounds—there were 4 of the 20 for whom I couldn’t find any specific or only vague accounts of their parents’ professions in an internet scan, though their elite schooling is front and center in bios. It’s hard to know whether that information gap comes from a mere focus on professionalism, as I’m sure many would assert, or if there’s also something else at work—a working-class shame or a desire not to acknowledge a background of privilege, especially when a writer’s work focuses on poverty like that of C. E. Morgan and Dinaw Mengestu. The latter, for instance, notes that his father worked for Caterpillar immediately after immigrating from Ethiopia, but not what he did there or what later jobs he had when, as Mengestu notes, his family moved to Chicago to pursue “middle-class comfort” and where he attended an elite Roman Catholic high school. Salvatore Scibona says that his parents didn’t have the money to pay for his college, but not what they did for a living. For those who will not be specific about their lives or who are cryptic, it’s impossible to know.

As a sideline, it’s also indicative of something that even when these young writers mention their fathers’ careers, they often don’t mention any career for their mothers. So, I found careers for 16 to 17 fathers/grandfathers, but only 10 for mothers. There may still be a large housewife factor for the mothers of prominent writers.

There’s a strong cultural belief that our country is a meritocracy, and I’m sure that a lot of people would explain all of this by noting that these young writers simply have more talent and drive than other young writers. Not only is admission to The New Yorker a practice that must select from the best, so is admission to these elite universities. I certainly do agree that they are a highly talented group, and I’m a fan of some of their writing. I’ll never forget reading Nicole Krauss’s “From the Desk of Daniel Varsky” in Harper’s in 2007—I thought it was the best thing by far and away that I had read in any of the big magazines in years, maybe ever.

But I also laughed out loud when reading an article about her in New York magazine (“Bio Hazards”) that talks about the trials of her being married to another hot young writer, Jonathan Safran Foer, receiving a six-figure advance on her second and third novels, living in a multi-million-dollar brownstone, and the privilege of her early life. “But what of it?” the article’s author, Boris Kachka, writes. “Authors through the ages have been well-off and well connected.” He goes on to note that Krauss thinks that “the writer’s biography” is “irrelevant at best.”

People, this is like white people saying that color doesn’t matter. Privilege is only irrelevant if you have it.

I won’t even get into how good-looking all these young writers are, especially the women.

But I will note that I am planning to expand my reading in regard to these issues. Perhaps I will even read B. R. Myers’s A Reader’s Manifesto, perhaps even The Communist Manifesto to which its title refers. Myers’s goal is to promote genre fiction over elite literary work, and there is nothing I despise more than the lurid fantasy novels that my students seem to love so much or the turgid prose and sexist characters in so much science fiction. I have no idea how to reconcile all these conflicts—I love literary fiction and nonfiction and poetry, I teach it to my students, and it’s where my heart is, but I’m starting to think that in the lower end of the creative writing world—itself a very privileged place by some standards, and where I live—maybe it makes sense to also advise my students to turn to genre writing, barring premier grad school options or medical school. It’s the place where our students, especially our MFA students, might actually have a chance. At UCF, we have even a couple of faculty members who write genre fiction. The idea of this shift makes my skin crawl, but I may be a snob in beggar’s clothing.

The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Father: statistics prof at University of Nigeria
Mother: University registrar
bachelor’s communications/political science, Eastern Connecticut State U
MFA Johns Hopkins
MA (African studies) Yale

Cris Adrian
Father: airline pilot
Mother: ?
bachelor’s English University of FL
MD Eastern VA Medical School
studied Harvard Divinity School
MFA Iowa

Daniel Alarcon
[immigrated from Peru age 3]
Father: physician
Mother: physician
bachelor’s anthropology Columbia
MFA Iowa

David Bezmozgis
[immigrated from Latvia to Canada age 6]
Father: ?
Mother: ?
bachelor’s English McGill
MFA University Southern California

Joshua Ferris
Father: stockbroker for Prudential, investment company owner
Mother: ?
bachelor’s English & Philosophy Iowa
MFA UC Irvine

Jonathan Safran Foer
Father: lawyer
Mother: president of public relations company
bachelor’s philosophy Princeton University
[no MFA but did undergrad thesis with Joyce Carol Oates]

Nell Freudenberger
[her wedding announcement lists John Lithgow as her godfather]
Father: TV screenplay writer
Mother: ? [career not listed in wedding announcement, though groom’s mother’s is]
bachelor’s Harvard University
MFA New York University

Rivka Galchen
Father: professor of meteorology
Mother: computer programmer at National Severe Storms Laboratory
bachelor’s English Princeton University
MD Mount Sinai School of Medicine
MFA Columbia University

Nicole Krauss
Grandfather: Ran Tel Aviv branch of Bulova
“the isolated splendor of her Bauhaus childhood home”, garden designed by “an Olmsted”
Father: orthopedic surgeon
Mother: ?
bachelor’s English/creative writing Stanford University
MA art history Oxford University/Courtauld Institute

Yiyun Li
[“grew up in a two-room apartment in Beijing with her mother, father, grandfather, and sister”; parents don’t speak English; immigrated to U.S. age 24]
Father: physicist
Mother: teacher
bachelor’s science Peking University
MS immunology Iowa
MFA Iowa

Dinaw Mengestu
[born in Ethiopia; immigrated to Peoria (later Forest Park, IL) at age 2]
Father: worked for Ethiopian Airlines, then worked at Caterpillar factory headquarters (“hope of rising to middle-class comfort”)
Mother: ?
attended “elite Roman Catholic high school”
bachelor’s English Georgetown University
MFA Columbia University

Philipp Meyer
[grew up in “working class” neighborhood]
Father: electrician/college biology instructor
Mother: artist
bachelor’s English Cornell University
no MFA, but fellowship at Michener Center for Writers in Austin

C.E. Morgan
[writes about working class people, but is secretive about her past]
Father: ?
Mother: ?
bachelor’s voice Berea College [“a tuition-free labor college for students from poor and working-class backgrounds in Appalachia”]
master’s Harvard Divinity School

Tea Obreht
[born in Yugoslavia, moved to Cyprus & Cairo following grandfather’s job at age 7, then to U.S. at age 12 or 13]
Grandfather: aviation engineer
Father: not mentioned
Mother: ?
bachelor’s University of Southern California
MFA Cornell University

ZZ Packer
Father: bar & lounge owner
Mother: worked for Social Security Administration
BA Yale University
MA Johns Hopkins University
MFA Iowa
Stegner Fellowship Standford University

Karen Russell
[notes that she finished her MFA with a lot of student debt]
Father: Vietnam veteran
Mother: real estate attorney
bachelor’s Northwestern University
MFA Columbia University

Salvatore Scibona
[claims to have been working class, parents wouldn’t have money to send him to college]
Father: ?
Mother: ?
bachelor’s St. John’s College, New Mexico
MFA Iowa

Gary Shteyngart
born in Leningrad
Father: engineer in a LOMO camera factory
Mother: pianist
bachelor’s Oberlin College
MFA Hunter College of CUNY

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
Father: academic physician
Mother: ?
bachelor’s Brown University
MFA Iowa

Wells Tower
Father: teacher
Mother: teacher
BA anthropology & sociology Wesleyan University
MFA Columbia University

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Hard Times

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Lisa Roney


It’s Labor Day, and it’s hard not to think about the economic hard times we are living through now. Although I am a lucky person with a relatively secure and decently paid job, even I live with the evidence of decline—the house across the street that has been vacant for three years, the colleague whose husband lost his job, our continually eroding health and retirement benefits in the State of Florida, the old guy who bicycles by every now and then looking for yard work, the empty storefronts even in fancy Winter Park, the massive numbers of now-homeless pets that have been abandoned by families in distress.

My new mantra is that some people lived through the Fall of the Roman Empire, too. For some reason, that thought calms me, though I’m not sure it should.

So, today I bring you a selection of songs about hard times and hard work. (For some of us, it’s a holiday, so maybe there’s time to listen to more than one.) I’ve tried to select only first-person songs that are about the personal experience of economic difficulty and hard labor, as opposed to the many more that are about the poor who are “them.” As the span of dates on these songs indicates, of course, there are hard times all the time, depending on who you are. It’s just that now we are returning to a pre-Civil Rights pervasive poverty for more people, and the rich are getting richer.

Bing Crosby, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (1931)

Woody Guthrie, “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore” (1944)

Nina Simone, “Pirate Jenny” (1964)

Bob Marley, “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)” (1974) (see above)

Bruce Springsteen, “Factory” (1978)

Simply Red, “Money’s Too Tight to Mention” (1985)

Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car” (1988)

Ani DiFranco, “Coming Up” (1992)

Michael Franti & Spearhead, “Crime to Be Broke in America” (1994)

Cam’ron, “I Hate My Job” (2009)

Script, “For the First Time” (2010)

Andy Grammer, “Keep Your Head Up” (2011)

My favorites, I will admit, are the protest songs, the ones like Marley’s and DiFranco’s that call for revolution—“A hungry mob is an angry mob” and “whoever’s in charge up there had better take the elevator down and put more than change in our cup, or else we are coming up.” Even though Marley’s song encourages listeners to take comfort in dancing, there’s the implication that poverty should not be tolerated. On the other hand, two of the more popular recent hard-times songs, “For the First Time” by Script and “Keep Your Head Up” by Andy Grammer, seem more sanguine, more insistent that poverty isn’t all bad.

Some of these newer pop songs feel a bit to me like pacifiers—little anthems for hard-hit folks to sing along to and feel better, feel encouraged, feel hopeful. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, studies show that domestic violence has increased significantly since the onset of the recession, and so it might be a good thing for men who listen to this kind of music—who may be struggling with issues of anger and resentment, who may be tempted to raise a hand to a family member in frustration—to hear a song that encourages them to pull together with their loved ones. On the other hand, these songs also assert that poverty is not important, that it can be overcome, that struggling people should address it with personal gratitude and forbearance.

They’re also just a little hard to believe, what with those beautifully veneered teeth, stripper types showing up in videos, and happy tunes. There are tougher recent songs out there, like Cam’ron’s “I Hate My Job.” He’s just not played as much on pop radio. Go figure.

Anyway, happy day off, to those who have the day off.

* * *

The selection process was hard. There are some good articles and lists about this subject, past and present:

Poem Hunter Songs About Poverty

Social Justice Song Index

10 Best Songs About Poverty

Top 10 Songs About Working Hard for the Money

Telecaster Songs for Recession

Washington Post, “The Recession Becomes a Topic in Popular Music”

Guardian, “Beyonce’s New Single Spells Economic Doom”

Telegraph, “Recession Means Depressing Music”

A contrary opinion from American Public Radio Marketplace, “Pop Music Misses Recession”

Another, different opinion from the Idolator, “Can We All Stop Saying that Pop Music Reflects the Economy, Please?”

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Crime for Crime

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Lisa Roney

In a week when most of us in the U.S. are called upon to celebrate our freedom, just a reminder that the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.

By 2009, 2,284,913 people were in prison in the U.S. That is approximately 1 in every 135 people. Many or most of these people are incarcerated for non-violent crimes like drug possession and immigration violations. These numbers have continued to rise even as violent crime rates have dropped.

By 2009, 7,225,800 people were either in prison or jail or on probation or parole, or 1 in every 32 people. Read that again. When I mentioned it to my husband, he said, “Really? Maybe you should double-check that.” I did. Yes, 1 in every 32 people.

Wow.

That might not be 1 in 32 of the people I know, or that you know, but that just means that in some neighborhoods, it’s 1 in 10, or 1 in 5, or every single adult in sight.

These numbers should make us cry. They are a great shame to us all.

And that’s another thing: all the money that goes into our prison system does not go into education. By 2008, in five states, prison expenditures had already surpassed those for education, and across the country as a whole prison budget growth far exceeds education budget growth. Lack of education is, of course, one of the strongest factors in someone choosing a life of crime. It’s a vicious cycle.

Justice is not color blind. In 2009, rates of incarceration were: 706 of every 100,000 white males, 1,822 per 100,000 Hispanic males, and 4,749 per 100,000 of non-Hispanic black males.

In October 2010, there were 3,242 prisoners on death row in the U.S. Execution rates have been steadily dropping from their 1999 high (of 98 executions) because DNA evidence has been used to exonerate so many death row inmates and so the infallibility of convictions has been called into question. Still, 46 people were executed in 2010 and 25 so far in 2011.

Casey Anthony, however, was declared not guilty even of manslaughter in the death of her child this week. DNA and its representation on TV detective shows has apparently made people believe that a strong circumstantial case is never good enough. That this woman will go free while many people rot in jail for being caught with a little marijuana is incredible indeed. I do believe that the prosecution focused not enough on the fact that Caylee died under Casey’s care (implying gross negligence) when they chose to try to prove premeditation and get the death penalty. The death penalty is not a good idea, even when its distractions get someone off. Period.

For a long time, I believed, contrary to my general progressive liberalism, that there could conceivably be times when the death penalty was warranted. But after considering the racial prejudices apparent in the death row statistics, and those exonerated by DNA, and the fallibility of much eye-witness testimony, not to mention the high financial burden of death penalty appeals, I changed my mind. Ani DiFranco helped me do so with this song, “Crime for Crime.”

Information from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics a and b, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the International Centre for Prison Studies, and the Death Penalty Information Center. There is some slight variation in numbers depending on exactly how counts are made and which prisoners are included (pre-trial vs. convicted, etc.)

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Fourths of July

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Lisa Roney


The Fourth of July has never been one of my favorite holidays. I’ve always tried to enjoy it, but the flag-waving crowds and noise were never fun for me. I saw the fireworks on the Washington mall once, but the fellow behind us kept shooting bottle rockets into my back. Fortunately, they were duds, but it still scared me, and the adrenalin got me in a yelling match with him. I’ve watched the fireworks over the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia Beach, too, but the debris that polluted the water just depressed me. And once, in State College, Pennsylvania, I went with friends out to a field where we hoped the distance would give us a good view without the deafening noise. Instead, an oppressive cloud system held the smoke in and all we saw were a few glimmers through a thick, billowing, brown haze. We coughed and went home. None of it ever seemed worth the trouble.

Mainly, though, I always felt protective of my pets, who were always scared by the noise. And the only Fourth of July that I ever spent in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, I had cause to worry about more than my own pets. As I sat on the front steps of my house, alone and anticipating my upcoming move from the town I’d so briefly adopted, with my five cats all hiding under beds and sofas inside, I listened as the noisemakers rose into the sky and watched as the colorful starbursts formed over the West Branch of the Susquehanna River across from my house. I did my best to enjoy the sight if not the sound. But then I saw it: a fat, scruffy basset hound lumbering terrified down the street—the middle of the street.

The dog did not move smoothly—it lurched and staggered—but it was moving fast. Every time another crackling bang echoed across the river, it would flail its head back and forth, its long ears flapping like birds in glue traps. I stood up and went to intercept it. Although the streets had emptied for the fireworks, as soon as they were over, people would be speeding home. I needed to stop the dog.

At first, it veered toward the far side of the road, but I could see as I got closer that the dog was old and was flagging fast. I stooped down and spoke calmly to him. “Come,” I said. “Come here.” He collapsed almost immediately in front of me, and I took hold of his worn leather collar.

It was all I could do to get the dog to get up again. He panted and heaved, and his eyes rolled back in his head. I thought he might die on the spot, but finally, after much soothing and coaxing, I got him to move toward the house. As soon as we got to the bottom of my front steps, I realized he would never be able to go up them—the dozen steep steps were much too much for his stubby legs. I also realized from his white muzzle and cataract-fogged eyes that he was not just old, but very old.

About this time, my neighbor and friend Deb came cruising around the corner. She’d come a block over from her house to get a better look at the fireworks reflecting in the river water, but she ended up helping me carry the dog up to my front porch, where he cowered under the wrought-iron patio couch. Deb was much more connected in the community than I was, and she said that she’d find out whose dog it was. In the meantime, I went in and got a bowl of water and a few dry crackers to feed him. He came out from under the couch and wagged his tail once before slurping down the water.

Deb and I noticed that the dog wasn’t in the greatest of shape. His toenails protruded like talons, and his fur had shed itself all over us as we lifted him up the steps. I began to pull off piles of dead hair from his back. Oily and smelly, it was clumped all over his body. He clearly hadn’t been brushed or bathed in months if not years, so I retrieved a brush and a shedding blade and went to work. Deb went off to see if she could find out where he’d come from.

The dog put his head in my lap and enjoyed his brushing. Though he still shook a bit when the fireworks went off, he stretched and rolled over for a belly rub. I brushed until I had a solid pile of fur as big as a twelve-pound cat. He nudged my knee with his nose every time I slowed down. “You haven’t had much attention lately, have you?” I asked him, and he licked my hand.

After a few minutes, Deb showed up with the dog’s owner in tow. The woman seemed thoroughly irritated, though she expressed relief that we’d gotten the dog off the street. In her haste to come and get him, she hadn’t brought a leash, and Deb suggested we at least give her a bit of rope so the dog wouldn’t get spooked by the traffic, both automotive and pedestrian, now streaming away from the fireworks site. And without further ado, the woman dragged the dog down the grass slope beside the front steps and off down the street. It struggled to keep up with her.

Deb trembled as she told me that she’d found a gate wide open from the alley into a dank, bricked townhouse yard filled with feces. On the front porch of the same house, a party was in progress, and when Deb asked if they were missing a basset hound, she got blank stares. Finally, Deb had been motioned inside and had followed the woman through to the back door. “I guess someone forgot to close the gate,” the woman said. “He’s really scared of the fireworks.”

Deb asked gingerly if the dog shouldn’t have been in the house, since it was a mere two blocks from fireworks central. The woman explained with a shrug that it had been a family pet, but that since the kids were grown it “just stays in the back yard.”

Deb and I sat on my front porch with the enormous pile of smelly fur I’d combed off the dog, watching people strolling home after their pleasant celebratory evening and wishing that we could do something for the old basset hound. “They must never even take it round the block for a walk,” she said, speaking from her knowledge as a frequent dog-walker. “I thought I knew all the dogs in the neighborhood. But I’ve never seen that one.” She swore she would check on it again.

We thought about our own pets that had grown old—decrepit, maybe, but never ignored, never neglected the way this dog was. We thought about the menagerie of feral cats we’d been working on rescuing over the past months. We knew there were animals worse off than this one as well as ones better off. But, still, we thought it a shame that its people would consign its aching, old body to a brick courtyard and no human comfort even in times of fear and peril.

It’s difficult to write about animals without sentimentality. And sentimentality is a bugaboo for positive thinkers and realists alike. It’s something I’ll explore more in this blog at some point. But every Fourth of July, I think of that old basset hound floundering down the street in terror, while oblivious people, even his own people, celebrated whatever it was they celebrated—democracy, supposedly, independence, maybe, freedom, perhaps, or just a day off work and an excuse to get drunk and make dangerous noise while other creatures cowered and fled. This habit seems so American. Sometimes I wish our public celebrations of our nationhood would reflect some other, better American qualities.

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A Beautiful Day with Health Insurance

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Lisa Roney

November 14, 2010, was a beautiful Sunday, and I talked my husband into taking a bike ride with me. In Florida, where we live, November is filled with clear air and sunshine. Hurricane season is a quickly fading memory, and yet it’s not cold enough to require even a sweater. Bruce and I rode to the end of a nearby bike trail, stopped for water and for me to check my blood sugar, then headed back. As we crested a bridge over a road, I suddenly felt pain like I’ve never experienced before. It was like nails being pounded in all over my head.

Bruce could tell that something was wrong, but he thought I was just dehydrated. “Stop and have some water,” he said.

“If I stop,” I told him. “I won’t be starting again.” I knew it was really, really bad, but it never occurred to me to call 911. We crept slowly another mile and a half home. As soon as I stopped and took my helmet off, however, I felt as though I’d been scalped. I put my hand up, expecting the blood to be running down the back of my head. Then I began vomiting. We went to the ER.

The ER folks were indifferent, assuming I was just another case of food poisoning or stomach virus. Later, the neuro techs would tell me that ERs are terrible with neuro cases. But with a little help from my endocrinologist, and some insistence from me, we managed to get seen fairly quickly. The ER doc asked me how my pain compared to having my hand slammed in a car door. Worse, I said, far, far worse. His smile fell just a bit.

The initial CT scan showed bleeding in the brain, and the doc transformed from cavalier to grim. When he gave this news to my husband and me, I knew I might die. That’s what a brain hemorrhage meant to me. The only person I knew who’d had one was the young brother of a high school friend of mine, who had survived all kinds of surgeries and treatments for other health problems and finally had been given a clean bill of health, only to drop dead of a brain hemorrhage as a teenager. I told myself that had been nearly thirty years ago, but my husband had tears in his eyes, and the nurses were prepping me for a trip to the main hospital on a helicopter. The pain would not stop. As they wheeled me out and put me in the helicopter, I looked up at the now-night sky and a gorgeous moon. I asked La Luna to let me live. Then they put the ear protectors on me and off we went, flying through the dark on what seemed a big Vibra-bed.

Within a few hours, we knew that, although I wasn’t completely out of danger, I had a better chance than most of being okay. The first angiogram revealed what they thought was a “benign perimesencephalic sub-arachnoid hemorrhage.” SAHs kill 40-50% of people who have them, but the type I’d had meant that they found no large aneurysm waiting to kill me, just some unexplained bleeding near the brain stem in between the pia and arachnoid membranes that surround the brain. The initial diagnosis was correct, and although I spent ten days in the hospital being re-tested and monitored for complications, and nearly a month on anti-seizure and anti-stroke medication, I escaped unscathed except for the ten pounds I gained lying around on the couch for a month.

The hospital where I stayed is a Seventh Day Adventist hospital. They were wonderful to me. The food was awful, but the nurses and doctors were attentive and caring and kind and seemed to have a real sense of mission. I felt throughout that I was very well taken care of. (And I am not always so sanguine about health care I receive.)

But one of the nurse’s aides mentioned to me that God must have some plan for my future, that I must have survived this terrible ordeal for a reason. A few days after getting out of the hospital, I went to my regular G.P. for a check-up, and his nurse told me about her sister’s brain hemorrhage. She survived, but suffered some irreparable brain damage. The nurse noted, however, that it “had brought her back to God,” and for that she was grateful. “If it had to happen to bring her back to God,” she said, “then it had to happen.”

This is the Everything Happens for a Reason stipulation of much of the positive psychology movement as well as much evangelical Christianity. I don’t believe it for a minute. While many who spout this sort of thing do so with good intentions, the implications are radically unjust: that those who die have nothing left to live for, and that we get what we deserve in terms of our health. This is the underpinning of arguments against health-care-system reform in this country these days, and it is hogwash. A 2009 Harvard University study showed that 45,000 Americans die each year from lack of health insurance and that Americans under age 65 have a 40% higher chance of dying if they don’t have health insurance. I will say it over and over: the poor are not poor because they deserve it, and the ill are not ill (generally speaking) because they have brought it on themselves. What is more, the rich are not rich because they are smarter and worked harder than everyone else, and the healthy are not morally superior, no matter how well it serves them to delude themselves into thinking so.

I was lucky that I had the kind of brain hemorrhage I had, and that my husband and I had the good sense to seek medical help. I was lucky to be well enough employed that I had health insurance that assured my treatment and didn’t leave me with more than $100,000 of debt. That’s all.

I do believe, however, that this terrible ordeal intensified my appreciation for life. I may be able to make use of that intensification to achieve more or be more considerate of loved ones, even of myself. Without the pain, without the fright, I might have muddled on for a few more years without examining the triviality of my daily obsessions. I might not have made time for who I really am, but stayed busy trying to meet others’ expectations.

Illness is a rallying call to appreciate the extent of one’s good health, whatever that may be. It puts us on notice that life really is short. Without the experience of pain, I might not appreciate all these pain-free days I’ve had since. The same goes for pretty much all of the polar opposites that we talk about: wealth and poverty, friendship and loneliness, and so on. And it is one of the main reasons why I believe that “happiness” cannot exist without sadness, nor joy without sorrow. I believe that we should not insulate ourselves against the world of hurt that is out there. I’m not saying to seek out pain for its own sake (that’s masochism), but to remember, to care, to keep in mind that having and not having are not matters of mere deserving, no matter how lucky we may be today.

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Casey Anthony and the Ick Factor

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Lisa Roney

Since this is weird Florida week, I just have to say something about the Casey Anthony trial. For any people who live with their heads under rocks, Anthony is soon to be on trial in Orange County for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, in June of 2008. If there’s any story that should bring tears to our eyes, it’s one of a mother killing her own child. Or a father, though we are more used to male violence.

This particular story, however, has come instead to feel close to slapstick or some kind of satirical humor. The list of the tawdry and bizarre episodes has gone on and on. There was the mustachioed bail bondsman swooping  in from California in his cowboy hat, and, now, some “mitigation expert” who divorced her husband to marry a death row inmate showing up as part of the defense team. There’s the medical examiner with her own TV show. There are the anguished but mouthy grandparents, and the trashy photos of Casey Anthony partying, even after her child was “missing.” Everyone involved seems to have hired not only lawyers, but also publicists and PR experts. The grandparents are seeking to trademark the phrase “Justice for Caylee” to prevent sales of souvenirs.

Ever coyly smiling, Casey Anthony comes across as a narcissistic villain. By now it’s well established that she was a thief, check kiter, and pathological liar, and her bad behavior has been thoroughly trotted out and labeled. “Monster” is a favorite. Recently, Anthony’s lawyer was overheard telling her she was behaving like a two-year-old. He had found, perhaps, the perfect insult. I wonder if she feared for her life since it seems she killed her daughter for merely being a two-year-old and in the way.

I know it’s a stretch, but the whole thing has seemed to me as sensationalist as much genre fiction and Lifetime TV. I can no longer feel much of anything about it because of… well, because of the ICK FACTOR. I don’t respond well to melodrama—its manipulations are usually so obvious that I end up just not believing in them. For some people, though, this level of melodrama seems to increase feelings—we have certainly seen an outpouring of tears, anger, threats, and disgust, as well as an alternate passion about Casey Anthony’s right to be “a mother with a social life.” That this latter seems to have involved the mother chloroforming her child and locking her in the trunk of the car doesn’t seem to get through to those people, and the fact that Casey herself, sociopathic personality and all, is a pathetic tragedy even if she killed her child doesn’t seem to get through to the angry ones.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about access to emotions—how to evoke them, how to depict them honestly rather than manipulatively. Whenever things start to fall into black and white categories, I know something has gone seriously wrong and moved into the land of lies. Maybe that’s why I find something suspicious, not only about Casey Anthony, but also about all the “outrage” and “grieving.” It has become mania, obsession, and posturing, and it doesn’t feel like genuine emotion to me. It feels manufactured. And the fascination with the tawdry details feels too much like Casey’s own participation in a drug-, alcohol-, sex-, tattoo- and fantasy-fueled escape from her own real life. That Casey Anthony thought that whoring around and getting blitzed constituted “the good life” (a tattoo she got after her child was dead) seems like an eerie parallel to people’s enthrallment with Twilight.

It all smacks of bad fiction. Unfortunately the death of this little girl is all too real. I try to remember that small, hard fact.

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Freedom Rides of 1961

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Lisa Roney

I watched Oprah the other night. And in other entries I will come back to Oprah because in a way the idea for this blog began to grow with my discomfort with Oprah’s obsession with positive psychology. I love Oprah, don’t get me wrong. But on the positive psychology issues, I think she’s lost her mind.

Night before last, Oprah did her soon-to-end show about the Freedom Rides of 1961. This week is the fiftieth anniversary of their beginning. The early Civil Rights era is certainly always something that can bring a tear to my eye, and so I watched. I plan to watch the PBS documentary that will air on May 16.

I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1960, so I don’t remember the Freedom Rides. My parents over the years lectured my brother and me about the evils of racism and segregation, about Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, about Emmett Till, about the Birmingham Church bombing, about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. I grew up breathing that air. My mother would drive us down past the Lorraine Motel, long before it became a museum, and tell us about the shame of being a white person in Memphis.

My parents were not “radicals” and they did not participate in events like the Freedom Rides. By 1961, they had two young children and mainly watched as the major events played out, working to support their family, changing diapers, cooking meals. They were a different, quieter kind of activist in that both of them became educators and supported the aspirations and dreams of children and college students of all races for many long years. They had been raised on “Red, and yellow, black and white, we are all God’s children in his sight.” They believed it.

As I watched Oprah rotate through her numerous Freedom Rider interviews, I thought about her tears and my own. When I think about that era of U.S. history, I cry out of a sense of joy that things have changed, even if not enough. I cry out of sorrow and horror that things could have been the way they were, that so many individuals had to suffer needlessly for so long. I cry because I had a little white friend in Memphis in the sixties whose mother actually used the N-word. And because a few years later in Knoxville, I had a black school friend, Suzette, who would not come to my house to play. I cry because in Knoxville, I was one of very few white children who did not boycott school when busing for desegregation began. Otherwise I might never have played hopscotch with Suzette.

Of course, I can’t be sure why Oprah cried. She mentioned growing up in racist Mississippi, and so she certainly has painful memories of her own. But she also noted that the Freedom Riders indicate how much individuals can do to change things. I suppose I shouldn’t object to a note of triumphalism about the Civil Rights movement. It is well deserved, and it’s absolutely true that brave individuals stood their ground. I’m not sure that anything similar could happen today. Perhaps we do use the internet to make some changes in the world. But as was implicit in Oprah’s exhortation, there is no longer a sense of optimism among the young. And who can blame them?

One of the people on Oprah’s show was an elderly white gentleman who had attacked the Freedom Riders, there to express his regret. He noted that the young black man he’d been beating had told him that the Riders were there out of love, not hate, and would not fight back. Quite the contrast to the violent world of 9/11 and the violent reaction to it.

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