Fear and Loathing in New Orleans

Cigarettes are good for you because they are regulated by the FDA.

I just caught the tail end of an NPR story about how some "experts" fear that now that the FDA is charged with tobacco industry oversight, Americans will believe that cigarettes are safe.  On the one hand, such a fear is ludicrous.  Americans must understand that FDA approval doesn't guarantee the actual safety of a product.  I mean, the FDA approves of the fact that high fructose corn syrup appears in every food item we ingest.  High fructose corn syrup is killing us.  Ergo, the FDA's approval isn't so much a guarantee of food safety.  On the other hand, this is the first link that comes up when I google FDA + cigarettes.  Americans are pretty dumb.

Maybe the experts are overreacting when they believe that Americans will be tricked into smoking by government regulation of cigarettes.  But the government's support and enforcement of the transition to digital television is more than just the shift to a new era of idiot box technology.  In an article published this week, one sociologist sees government sponsorship of a brand new digital divide.  Those converter boxes?  They don't work well with rabbit ears.  They're designed to work with an antenna on a 30-foot pole.  This information?  Kept hidden by the government programs offering subsidies for a box whose residual cost is still high enough that very poor people won't be able to pay it.  This divide matters more than stories (again, thanks, NPR) dealing in sudden nostalgia for white noise and snow.  When the next hurricane is approaching New Orleans, the poor, the elderly, and the isolated may or may not be able to watch the weather and make informed decisions about whether to evacuate, even if they can coax their converter box to continuously broadcast a single channel for more than an hour (something I could not do when I hooked mine up in February) because digital signals tend to go out more quickly than analog.  The FCC is certainly aware of the limitations of digital broadcasting and aware of the fact that the 15% of Americans who still rely on non-cable television are poor, and more, don't have an antenna on a 30-foot pole.

I would say the FCC's warm and fuzzy assurances about digital TV are more dangerous than the FDA's oversight of the tobacco industry.  But that's just me.

If George Tiller Reaped What He Sowed, He Would Be the Commencement Speaker at the Medical School Graduation of Hundreds of Committed Future Abortion Providers. He Would Not Have Been Murdered.

As the predictable and immediate shock and anger over the death of Dr. Tiller has given way to sadness, confusion has also come to mark these past few days.  No, Randall Terry’s heartless, evil, and insane statement regarding Dr. Tiller’s assassination is not the root of this confusion, though I can see how you would think so.  The source of my current confusion is a more personal conflict.  Here’s what I mean.

On Monday, I posted a link to a newspaper account of Dr. Tiller’s death on Facebook.  My friend Miriam’s response, in the form of a comment beneath the link, was that she supposed Dr. Tiller reaped what he sowed.  Most of my friends don’t echo Randall Terry.  This was an unusual occurrence, so much so that I didn’t know what to feel at first.  I was initially so angry at her response that I nearly unloaded all my pro-choice rhetoric on her in an email.  But I didn’t.  I didn’t respond at all.  Today, in response to another link on Facebook, Miriam left a comment reminding me and other readers of her having put a baby up for adoption, and her having had a good experience in doing so, and asking me to reconsider my support for abortion rights.  I replied that I respected her position, and her bravery, but asked that she respect my position on abortion.

There’s more to this story, however.  I met Miriam when she was pregnant with the child she gave up for adoption.  She appeared in New Orleans during a period of years that I consider to be some of the most formative in my life.  Miriam was a member of a neighborhood family, a family composed of a wildly divergent group of individuals who—for reasons known only to the universe—encountered one another at a time when we all needed and were able to offer to each other a kind of understanding and support we were not receiving elsewhere.  I, personally, had begun to spend so little time at home in response to my biological family’s increasing instability that I carried a small bag with a change of clothes in it at all times in case I happened to not end up at home at all.  Most of my time, apart from work and school, was spent with Miriam and the other people from this group.  They are partly responsible for shaping me into the person I am when I am at my best.  They gave me confidence in my ideas and sensibilities, accepted my stubbornness and erratic moods, and most of all, taught me by example that surviving hard times is possible.

I admired Miriam instantly, and not simply because she had made what I knew was a difficult choice to carry a child and give it up, though this played a large part in it.  I admired her immediately because she possessed (and still possesses) a sense of purpose, because she has a work ethic that is rare in human beings, and because she is considerate and thoughtful in her treatment of others and in the decisions she makes.  This is the source of my conflict.  Miriam and I do not see each other frequently anymore.  In fact, the members of our mid-1990s patchwork family are spread out across the city and country.  One is dead.  Others haven’t communicated in years.  When I reflect on the state of these relationships, and I do so more often than you might believe, it amazes me that we’ve all fallen so far out of touch.  Simultaneously, I tell myself that that time in all our lives was meant to be limited.  I also tell myself to suck it up and not to mourn the end of this time. (But I do anyway.)  My respect and admiration for Miriam is deep, and the gratitude I have for hers and the others’ intervention in my life is great.  For someone I respect and admire, someone who taught me so much about living life on my own terms, to adopt a callous position on the death of an honorable man literally makes my heart ache.

I don’t expect to change Miriam’s position on abortion, or anyone’s for that matter.  I am writing this because I’m trying to figure out how a pro-life stance on abortion can translate into a blithe dismissal of gunning down a doctor.  I know that Randall Terry and Miriam are not the only people in the world suggesting that Dr. Tiller “reaped what he sowed.”  For three years, I worked in the office of a medical association for abortion providers (of which Dr. Tiller was a member).  Over those years, I helped run many direct mail campaigns and, because the mailers were sent out widely, we always received responses from people whose views did not include support for women’s retaining control over their own bodies.  On one hilarious and rainy Monday, I opened a return envelope containing our mail piece covered in one gentleman’s dried snot.  On the card, a series of pro-life statements were scrawled.  Snot!  The man mailed us his snot to show his opposition to abortion!  On several less hilarious days, I opened death threats.  These threats ranged from lucid suggestions of group suicides for “baby killers,” to crazed, foaming-at-the-mouth diatribes ending with threats to shoot us all in the face as we left our offices.  Those people probably believe that Dr. Tiller got what he deserved.

I didn’t seek out a job with this organization because the abortion “issue” was my issue.  I was broke and sick and needed a job that came with health benefits.  I took the job because it met that criterion.  Over the three years that I spent there, I watched the organization and the doctors and clinics it represented deal with repeated political and physical attacks that ranged, like our negative direct mail responses, from simple disagreement, to enraged ranting, to bombings.  The lesson that has stayed with me even since I’ve left the organization is the one I learned about dedication.  Everyone who worked there, whether they complained about their job or not, fought and continues to fight for women to be considered bright enough to decide what to do about an unsupportable pregnancy.  No one, from the hotline operators, to the directors, to the doctors, to the clinic staff, to the office staff of an organization like the one I worked for, is in it for the money or the health plan.  We were or are in it because the right to a safe and legal abortion needs defenders, and because the best defenders of this right get killed.

What I hope comes of this post is that Dr. Tiller’s murder is responded to with some respect going forward.  He did not get what he deserved.  He did not reap what he sowed.  He deserves honor, he sowed faith in women.  And he died for that sin.

R.I.P. George Tiller

Yesterday morning, Dr. Tiller was shot to death in his church in Wichita, Kansas.  He was one of this country's only late-term abortion providers and, most importantly, he fought vocally throughout his professional life for women to retain control of their own bodies.  This is a loss that defies description.  Dr. Tiller was one of a minority of abortion providers who, by continuing to provide controversial services, provoked constant vitriol from the Right's mindless voiceboxes.  And he persevered.  Dr. Tiller saved women's lives and did not apologize for doing so.  He was brave and exhibited a strength of character that few people exhibit.  He survived being shot in both arms in 1993 by an anti-abortion terrorist only to be gunned down by another one.  He will be missed.

Equal Pay for Equal Work, or, Equal Jobless Benefits (seeing as there's no work)

I know that bills like HB-705, the one about to be voted down by the Louisiana legislature that would acknowledge the fact that women make less than men and remedy the situation, have come around before.  Obviously, in Louisiana, such bills have not passed.  So I emailed my state rep this morning, and suggested that he vote for the bill.  Only, my state rep is the understudy to Nick Lorusso, who happened to be an Army reservist and happened to get called to active duty and, as such, is not on active legislative duty.  I wish Lorusso wasn't gone for this equal pay bill.  This is the guy who, on his way out last fall, tried to change the law so that he could return to his seat in the House, citing potential financial hardship as the reason.  As the author of the editorial linked above points out, Lorusso's effort to change the law clearly represents a simple effort to retain power and and as little to do with money, but embedded in such a cynical attempt is surely a sincere desire to effect real change in the world.  This is clearly a man who can see the wisdom in changing the status quo to benefit people who suffer under current conditions. 

The Times Picayune doesn't appear to be interested in HB-705, but they are interested in how a Baton Rouge legislator sneaked a provision into an unrelated bill that would allow the state to take stimulus money for jobless benefits, something Bobby Jindal said he'd oppose.  With unemployment rising across the country and in Louisiana, the timing of asking that women make the same pay as men for the same work is ironic at best. 

The employment situation in Louisiana is dire.  Every state institution has a hiring freeze in place.  Many private entities are following that lead and enacting freezes of their own.  I tried to quit school and get a job this fall.  I couldn't find a "professional position" in New Orleans that didn't require me to have a paralegal certification (which I intend to get right after I defend my dissertation so I can work in this godforsaken town).  All this to say: I sure hope things get better, but with cuts to higher education and health care dominating this year's budget slashing, my future in this state may be limited.  Making pay equal to a man's only matters if there is a way to earn a check. 

Maybe we can combine these two bills and ask for equal jobless benefits for equal non-work.

At least I'm learning something.

Usually, I use this space to complain about things that can be related, however tangentially, to the larger social or political universe in which we live.  Usually, I try to reserve personal complaints for status updates on Facebook.  Not all of us can be as thoroughly linked to the greater good as Dan Moshenberg, who uses his status updates to praise everyday revolutionaries who don't even have time for Facebook status updates, so busy are they smashing capitalism on local and global levels.  I strive to be a better person, on the Facebook or otherwise, but until then, I have a complaint.

Academia is bullshit.  If you stay within its confines for too long, your view of the world, and of what matters, could become irreparably skewed.  I'm fearful that I'm not tough enough to resist this kind of view-skewing, mind-warping, value-degrading brainwashing.  In the past two weeks, I've read a lot, written a lot, and learned a lot.  But I've also been inadvertently involved in a scandal wherein another instructor demonstrated a less-than-firm grasp on ethical behavior at my expense.  The situation has resolved itself, but it struck me as remarkable that someone who's an adult would behave as he did.  Academia rewards the kind of striving and ambitiousness that this person exhibited, however.  Lacking ambition as I do, why would I want to be in this world?  When I think about it, the answer is simple and clear: I don't.

Other, less dramatic, examples of my unfitness for academia abound.  This afternoon, I had lunch with my boss, a professor here.  At the end of a long narrative about his unfulfilled quest to find a suitable house to purchase, he sighed and said that he was tired of "living like a gypsy."  Granted, it was an offhand remark, and certainly not a commentary on the living conditions of the Roma, but I found myself struck (again) by his estimation of what "living like a gypsy" might mean.  This is a man who lives in an expensive apartment, outfitted with expensive electronics, receives a sizeable salary, plays golf as often as he can, and who maintains a very stable existence and he made a statement from which one might conclude he's struggling to make it from check to check.

If I stick around, if I keep going to classes, teaching classes, reading books, writing papers, convincing myself to participate in conference presentations, or worse, seeking publication for my work, am I destined to grow into a person who has no sense of the larger world?  I don't want to be that kind of person.  Do I leave now?  Quit the PhD and figure out a new plan?  Or can I stay, can I find a better balance?

Every academic is not an unethical, insecure jerk waiting for an opportunity to manipulate a situation to his advantage.  Every academic is not a navel-gazing professor who confuses his charmed life with that of people who actually suffer.  Some academics are, in fact, Dan Moshenberg.  I get it.  But what do I do about it?  Apart from taking my complaint to the interwebs, I appear to be at a loss.    

Motorcycles, Confederate Flags, and Pregnant Teenagers

The revelatory impact of visiting other parts of the state of Louisiana can sometimes be difficult to bear.  In the New Orleans bubble, we have plenty of problems--political corruption, violent crime, generalized fear of violent crime, few really solid vegetarian options--but these problems are knowable to a resident of the city.  They can be managed through the expression of a shared sense of hopelessness that urbane New Orleanians have often relied upon in times of crisis.  We are capable of sitting in a bar and alternately bemoaning, in reverent tones, the latest exchange of bullets between teenagers in Central City and, in tones more bemused than cynical, the latest confrontation between the mayor's office and the city council.  These are our urban problems and we know what to do with them.

There are at least two ways that a person like me who rarely, if ever, spends time in non-urban areas, views small town life.  Either it is the real and true (fill in the blank here, America, Louisiana, Universe); or, small town life is just the unknown.  Daniel and I went to Pontchatoula yesterday for the annual Strawberry Festival.  We consumed many strawberry things: strawberry beignets, strawberry lemonade, strawberry shortcake, chocolate covered strawberries, strawberry hot sausage po boy.  (Okay, the po boy was just regular hot sausage.)  In our perigrination in search of more and better strawberry-oriented food items, that is, in our wandering throughout the entire area of the festival, we observed a preponderance of motorcycle enthusiasts and pregnant girls who were not old enough to vote.  By "preponderance," I might mean, overrepresentation.

As urban people, perhaps as people who simply don't encounter the confederate flag with any frequency, we were both taken aback by the image's prevalence, on jackets, vests, painted onto the motorcycles directly, in the white motorcycling groups.  Often clarified in its intent by having the phrase "the South with rise again" superimposed on the image of the flag itself, the confederate flag was everywhere.  Further complicating any interpretation of the ubiquity of the image, however, was its appearance on the hood of a hot rod car being lovingly buffed by its owner, a black man.  What kind of positive meaning does the confederate flag have for a black man?  Not being the kind of people who dismiss someone's appropriation of a symbol because we believe it to be inappropriate, Daniel and I left it where it was.  It remains unclear to either of us why a black dude would proudly employ a confederate flag.  I'm okay with the ambiguity.

When it is clear that that kind of ambiguity does not exist, that the use of a symbol whose intent is to equate white power with state power is intended as a warning to those who do not think the same way, I begin to silently promise myself that I will never stray from Orleans Parish again.  As we walked passed one of the stars-and-bars-patch-sporting denizens of Pontchatoula or its environs, Daniel said "My brain just superimposed a klansmens' hood onto that guy's head."  It was more curiosity than fear that was evoked in him by his brain's subconscious interpretation, but when, upon further reflection, he said that it was a look in the guy's eyes that had resulted in this interpretation, my internal tolerance-or-rural-life limit had been reached.

It’s not just the racism represented by a confederate flag that simultaneously pisses me off and freaks me out.  It’s the hate of difference in all its forms, except perhaps in acceptable forms such as forming a motorcycle club to ride around town deafening regular people with your ridiculous and persistent revving of engines.  It’s not that there aren’t modern day confederates in the cities.  I can think of a few whose acquaintance I’ve had the misfortune of making.  It’s that those confederates keep their flags to themselves for the most part because their reactionary beliefs don’t easily find a venue for expression in an urban environment.  Am I saying that if I don’t have to see the flags themselves, that it doesn’t matter that there are people whistling Dixie and meaning it all over the place?  Sort of.  Because if they’re not public in the city, the lynch mob won’t be making a comeback in New Orleans anytime soon.  Am I saying that racism is less present in New Orleans than in Pontchatoula?  Nope.  It’s just different.  And that’s the subject of a different polemic.

Which brings me to the concluding point of this polemic.  It’s more of a series of questions.  Does the presence of a large number of pregnant teenagers, black and white teenagers, at a major public festival indicate a greater acceptance of the reality of teen pregnancy in rural areas?  Are there more pregnant teenagers in Pontchatoula than in New Orleans?  Are they more visible in Pontchatoula at a public festival because it represents a gathering of communities that are usually segregated by race, class, and the rural/urban divide?  Have teenagers really not figured out how to use condoms yet?  Are condoms really not available in areas where resistance to sex education is greater?  Are those areas rural areas?

I don’t know the answers to these questions.  I do know that strawberry beignets are delicious, and that culture shock is important.  Yesterday I learned that I’m more comfortable facing the difficult questions posed by urban life than those posed by rural life.  Presumably, this indicates that pursuing a PhD in Urban Studies wasn’t the wrong choice.              

Barkus, Endymion, Eris, Mardi Gras Day: photos.

American Pie

This afternoon I attended a panel discussion about inter-ethnic coalition building and race relations in New Orleans.  As is usually the case, I formulated the question I wanted to ask the panelists way late in the game and the discussion was over before I got a chance to ask it.  So I feel compelled to ask it here.  But first, a little about the panel.

Three men who occupy leadership positions in organizations that represent the interests of marginalized communities (well, two who do that, one who leads a group that appears to represent the interests of those already at the post-Katrina planning table), offered their answers to some very good questions posed by the moderator about the nature of coalition building among diverse communities in the city--mostly post-Katrina.  The answers were very thoughtful, and they were generally interesting. 

The panelists and moderator all clearly reflected  real connection to the issues that confront the development of lasting relationships among black and Latino (and Asian and white, these categorizations made appearances as well) groups.  But the regular American paradigm of white as the norm, and "other" as the sidelined entity capable of assimilating its way to a bigger slice of the pie (to reconstruct a metaphor frequently tossed out during the panel) reigned supreme.   

This is the problem.  When we talk about race, or ethnicity, in New Orleans and in the rest of the country, we forget that we're really talking about a power structure, and that really really, we're talking about a convenient construct created and deployed by this power structure to ensure that those of us who sit at the kids' table don't even see the pie on the grown-ups' table.  What I wanted to ask the panelists, all of whom are clearly sincere and highly engaged in their work, is what they think the goal of their coalition building is.  Most of the talk was about access to jobs, which is very important, and about access to political decisionmaking, which is equally important.  So the outcome might be that there is some job creation that is geared toward marginalized communities in the area, and that another non-white politician wins an election.  Is this the goal?  Are any problems solved?  Should representatives of marginalized communities get together to plan strategies to ask politely for bigger pieces of pie?  This seems to be the line of thought represented by the panelists, and indeed, it is a traditionally middle class, assimilation oriented, strategy that brought a lot of the gains made by the Civil Rights movement in this country.

But what if representatives of marginalized communities built coalitions based on an understanding that the (white) power structure of the United States will give them a little slice of pie if they ask politely, but might offer larger servings if it looked as though these communities saw the structure for what it was.  And here's the thing, I know that black people, Latino people, Asian people, and plenty of white people whose race grants them a spot in the front of the pie line (but which fails to ensure that the pie won't be gone when they get there because they're gay or old or female or disabled) know that politeness only goes so far.  When people talk to each other without microphones and TV cameras, the conversation reflects a shared knowledge that the real challenge to the idea of white (and male, and Christian) as normal and everyone/everything else as abnormal is simply failing to limit their associations to members of their own race or class or gender categories.  This is coalition building without leaders, and it happens whenever people relate to one another on the basis of shared interests.  Developing genuine relationships across the barriers imposed on us is the thing that most threatens the barriers.  So how can leaders of organizations that represent people who know how to do this already build coalitions and support the development of genuine relationships between members of separated communities?

To me, the answer is there in the history of New Orleans.  Many of the things we, as residents, value as evidence of New Orleans' exceptionalism are also evidence of a long history of accepting mongrelization as a cultural norm.  Our musical traditions and our carnival traditions, the two aspects of New Orleans culture that are often extracted and sold to the world as our heritage, are products of miscegenation.  Even white Mardi Gras, with its historical roots in white supremacy, is a mash up of carnival traditions appropriated from European, Caribbean, and Latin American sources.  Not being a carnival historian, I can't be sure, but I don't believe all those sources would pass DAR muster.

My point is only this: people relate to each other across color and culture lines all the time.  In New Orleans, these relationships made it into the cultural foreground, and in other places in the US, they didn't.  Why not build on this legacy in coalition building?  Why frame everything in political economy?  Why ask for pie when you can eat king cake?

The time has come to set aside childish things.

Not usually being a fan of scripture (Obama's inclusion of "non-believers" in the list of nationally-recognizable religious persuasions caused me to high five my neighbor, a Hindu woman who was equally pleased at the inclusion of her religious label in the list), I'm surprised upon listening to the speech again that that is the most resonant phrase.  Surely, it's momentary.  If I watch the speech again later, the part about cynics failing "to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply" might grab my attention the way it did when I was standing on the Mall wondering what the first signs of hypothermia are.

Having attended the inauguration and the feel-good concert that preceeded it, having reveled in the generalized glee of the hordes of people in the streets of Washington, DC, having had an opportunity to reconnect with friends I haven't seen for more than a year, and having had an 18-hour drive home during which to reflect on it all, I'm still not sure what I want to say about the whole experience.

It wasn't until I walked back into my house at the end of the drive home that I realized that, while "hope" and "change" are great concepts, that while Obama's inspired thoughtfulness is exactly what this country needs right now, and that while I felt more than ever that I, as an American citizen who is pro-hope, change, and inspired thoughtfulness have a will have an opportunity to really do something good and right in the context of this new political epoch, something was wrong.

I went to sleep because I was too exhausted to figure it out.  But when I woke up I knew what it was.  I realized that the weird unsettled feeling I'd had all weekend in Washington had nothing to do with missing work and classes and falling behind in my schoolwork.  I realized it was not related to the anxiety of a long drive, or the excitement of the political events.  I woke up Thursday morning and I knew what it was.  Without violating his privacy by being too specific, I realized I missed my brother terribly.  That even though he wouldn't have been in Washington with me anyway, not being able to communicate with him while we are, he and I, as Obama-supporting, change-requiring citizens, witnessing such a big deal is heartbreaking. 

It might sound sappy, or worse, New Age-y, but I believe that political change can be related to personal change.  I thought about it as I wandered around DC, seeing things I'd seen a thousand times, marking locations off in my mind and adjusting my map.  I hated DC when I lived there.  And now, given how new everything seemed in the bitter cold (familiar) and amid the sidewalk hustle (familiar), I wonder if the Bush Administration didn't have something to do with the repugnance DC developed for me near the end of my time there.  Don't anybody get excited, I still wouldn't move back there if you offered to pay my rent for a year, but the political climate and one's emotional climate are likely related--especially in a city like DC where the former is so present at all times.

The point I'm making here is that my happiness over the prospects President (!) Obama offers is tempered right now by my inability to share it with my brother.  But, to return to the beginning of this post, perhaps all of this sadness and worry are childish things.  Maybe the giant political change will yield a smaller but no less meaningful change for my brother and his situation.  Maybe this is the time we've been waiting for, to learn to trust each other and be better at being siblings.  Maybe I should put sadness and worry aside, believe that the ground has shifted beneath us, and go forward from here.

Random photo gallery.

Mid City.

Ubiquitous i-phone.

Lo's giant pants.

Rose.

Cupcake in a glass house.

Matching shoes! Shiny!  Hi-top!

Emily on New Year's Eve.

Are they posing?

Communication.

Ian + sparkler.

Flask.