Separately and together, we must invent joy

I'm trying to complete a post I started on July 25. Though I don't remember my original intention, the post has quickly become a mashup of thoughts about Marilynne Robinson's Lila, Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, and an estranged childhood friend who occasionally takes a swing at me via e-mail or Facebook message. Since the piece, tentatively entitled "Life crushes us all," ranges across issues of class and race and whiteness and the deepest disappointments that life can deliver, it has proven not merely difficult to bring to an integrated, well-reasoned conclusion, but has also become, into the bargain, no damn fun.

Of course, I am quite familiar with all the tactics I routinely rely on to both avoid bringing a writing project to a conclusion, and to excuse each failure to simply sit down and write. I should add, also, that in regard to the twin challenges to write and to keep writing, though familiarity does breed contempt, it does not reduce the effectiveness of those stale, old maneuvers.

In the 1990s, the decade that Marrianne McMullen and I shared major responsibility for publishing the Dayton Voice/Impact Weekly, I had the happy experience of quite often bringing writing projects, news stories, opinion pieces, et al., to a conclusion. But even then stories begun in a burst of inspiration would sometimes grind to a halt and find themselves forever abandoned. As any writer can testify, such failures are common and ought not even be remarked. After all, the opportunity to succeed once more, or even for the first time, arises with each new day, with every new story.

Sometime, in that period, I came across The Courage to Write, a book by Ralph Keyes, who lived in nearby Antioch, Ohio and was a leading figure in the Antioch Writer's Workshop. I fell instantly in love with the title, with the idea of the courage it takes to write. Surely a whole book on the subject was just the thing, and so I bought a copy; several copies, in fact, and gave some of them to people I knew who also trekked through the unmapped writer's swamp.

As it happened, the book did me no obvious good. Keyes' repeated assurance that no writer is alone in that boundless swamp did not seem to empower me, however hard he worked to document the point. But, in struggling with "Life crushes us all," I have found myself thinking about The Courage to Write. And for about four days running, I'd sit down and read a few pages from the book and find myself able to add 300, 400, even, 500 words after each reading. It was as if I had finally found the secret that works for me, that gets me sitting down, that gets me confidently picking my way through the swamp.

Alas and predictably, the moment I felt that I had discovered the right path for me, it turned out to be a mere trick, dissolving quickly into wisps of smoke. But a day or two ago, I encountered a 2013 Atlantic Magazine post of a video featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates himself talking about writing. In the video, he also uses the phrase "the courage to write."

"I think breakthroughs," Coates says, "come from putting an inordinate amount of pressure on yourself and seeing what you can take and hoping you can grow some new muscles. It's not really that mystical. It's like repeated practice over and over and over again and then suddenly you become something you had no idea you could be... I strongly believe that writing is an act of courage, almost an act of physical courage..."

Writers, Coates says, need to go back to their work repeatedly. Revise, rewrite and after awhile the idea you had in your head is 50 percent realized, then 60 percent, then 70 percent. It's never fully realized, he says, but you can get closer when you don't let up.

I am certainly writer enough to know that Coates is correct. You don't let up, you go back repeatedly and you revise and refine and every once in a while, after all that pressure focused on putting an idea into words, you achieve real clarity, a sentence, a paragraph, a whole piece to make you proud.

So, I'm going to get back to "Life crushes us all," though it might help if I came up with a new working title that was less of a club with which to whack myself, but not right this instant. In point of fact, the struggle with the piece really is not merely about the courage to write, it is also about clarifying my own thinking in a way that weaves together several related ideas that are nonetheless separate and most often considered independently of each other.

There is whiteness and the struggle, as Coates describes it, of black folks to both live with and within the havoc that white supremacy visits on a daily basis and to live and to forge independent identities beyond the reach of whiteness; there is also the injuries and insults of class as portrayed in Lila, and the special victimization of women who are further silenced and marginalized even in a time of extreme poverty when solidarity ought to be the default state of human relations; and there is also the accumulating losses and humiliations that the world has inflicted on my estranged childhood friend.

All of these are part of the collective experience of life and history in the country we live in together, and are more easily considered separately, but if we are ever to move into a world of justice, deep and shared, we need a more profound understanding of who we are separately and what we each have been through. And since it is impossible to both succinctly and comprehensively explore the variety of oppressions that afflict both our separate and collectives selves, the challenge is, to pervert a phrase from Lord of the Rings, to construct the one metaphor that will rule them all.

I haven't figured out how my draft of "Life crushes us all" gets from where it started to that happier place. But while I've been thrashing about in search for the courage to write, I've tried also to write in my journal, to sneak up on the problem(s) before me, to write around and through it. I might be getting somewhere. Yesterday, in my journal, I got to here:

"Sorrow
is for the love, the people, the things
taken from us...

"This, of course, is not enough because one cannot be forever sorrowing. In the face of the standard litany of loss that people endure, we must each rise up again after every lying down. We must proceed, not merely stoically. We must rise and proceed in spite of the beat-downs. Separately or together, we must invent and reinvent joy."

The Indictment of Mitt Romney

This indictment of Mitt Romney, raising questions about his fitness to serve as president of the United States, is past due. Of course, the simple fact of one’s unfitness to serve, would not prevent Romney from serving—one need only review the case of George W. Bush or, for that matter, the hallowed Ronald Reagan, who napped away at least the last half of his presidency while functionaries like Ollie North got away with murder.

But I digress. This indictment will frame the case against Romney based on his political flip-flops and prevarications, his mid-twentieth century air (far too retro for the challenges of our time), and the devastating simple-mindedness of his political program, at least insofar as it can be determined.

To make this case, the indictment will call upon the recent opinion pieces of several knowledgeable journalists and economists. It should be noted that the likely response from the Romney campaign to this indictment, other than studied indifference, will be to disparage both journalists and economists in sweeping terms.

No matter. Those who investigate and judge the particulars as outlined in this indictment will recognize that ad hominem attacks on the individuals (and their professions) quoted here are in no way a merit-based refutation of their arguments.

There is “…an existing stereotype of Romney and Republicans as wealthy white businessmen, clinking wine glasses while bemoaning the irresponsibility of the help,” wrote Michael Gerson in a column in The Washington Post on Sept. 21. Gerson, who was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, and may very well be the person who coined the phrase “compassionate conservative,” centered his column, “Ideology without promise,” on what the video of Romney at a Boca Raton fundraiser in May revealed.

The problem, Gerson wrote, isn’t really its power to confirm the stereotype of Romney, after all, “few imagined Romney to be a closet populist.” The problem is what the video suggests about “Romney’s view of the nature of our [current] social crisis.” Gerson’s elaboration of that crisis delves into the ways that the decay of neighborhoods, widespread job losses, poverty and personal financial collapse devastate individual lives and whole communities, magnifying their vulnerability and make government activism and creative policymaking an absolute necessity.

The Romney revealed in the video, and the incessant Republican political assault on the federal government, makes them worse than irrelevant. “…a Republican ideology pitting the ‘makers’ against the ‘takers’ offers nothing. No sympathy for our fellow citizens. No insight into our social challenge. No hope of change. This approach involves a relentless reductionism. Human worth is reduced to economic production. Social problems are reduced to personal vices. Politics is reduced to class warfare on behalf of the upper class,” Gerson wrote, in what might be the most withering dismissal that will be written by a Republican about Romney and his campaign during this political season.

A day later the Post published a piece by Ezra Klein also focused on Romney and the 47-percent video. (Unfortunately, try that I might, I cannot locate a web version of this article available for free.) In his piece “Romney’s skewed view on personal responsibility,” Klein, formerly a business writer for the Post and now one of their most frankly liberal op-ed columnists, demolished Romney’s pay-no-income-tax dismissal of half of the country. “…more than 60 percent of [the 47 percent] were working and contributing payroll taxes—which means they paid a higher effective tax rate on their income than Romney does,” Klein wrote, adding that “an additional 20 percent were elderly.”

Worse than Romney’s dismissal of low-wage workers and retirees, Klein continued, was his description of who he needed to care about politically. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” Romney said.

The horror here is that the people Romney dismisses are the people who must take more, not less, responsibility for their lives, Klein wrote. The time spent commuting on public transportation and wrestling with the scheduling difficulties that result, the time spent worrying about how to get one’s children into decent, affordable schools, the energy spent deciding on what to pay or what to buy in any given week, managing a budget with no give and with holes in the safety net below, takes an enormous amount of responsibility and energy. Mistakes of judgment will be made, Klein wrote, citing studies that vividly demonstrate how fraught and consequential are the lives and decisions of the 47 percent.

“Romney, apparently, thinks it’s folks like him who’ve really had it hard. ‘I have inherited nothing,’ the son of a former auto executive and governor told the room of donors.’ Everything Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way.’ This is a man blind to his own privilege,” Klein concluded.

Also applicable here might be former Texas Governor Ann Richard’s observation about Bush, the father. “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”

In another piece in the Post that ran the same day as Klein’s piece, Colbert King made the case that the most damning thing about what Romney said privately in Boca Raton in May is how dramatically it undercuts what he said to the NAACP in public at their July convention. (King’s column, titled in the print edition, “Not buying what Romney is selling,” King quoted Romney’s apparently sincere sympathy for African Americans who live in a country where equal opportunity is not “an accomplished fact.” Because that is the case, our bad economy is not “equally bad for everyone. Instead, it’s worse for African Americans in almost every way,” Romney told the audience.

King detailed Romney’s claims to understanding and empathy. “We don’t count anybody out,” Romney said, “Support is asked for and earned, and that’s why I’m here today."

But, King wrote, the stuff Romney told the NAACP audience in July doesn’t square with the stuff he said privately in May to wealthy supporters at the Boca Raton event. “Romney, of course, was slurring more than the members of the NAACP, wrote King. “He also insulted retirees, college students, Americans with disabilities and people who work for a living for not much pay.”

In speaking to the Boca Raton donors, “witness Romney, the Chameleon, telling that crowd what they wanted to hear,” King wrote, in the process raising the implicit question: Why would an audience of political donors want to hear a presidential candidate dismiss 47 percent of the country?

Though an important question in its own right, it is nevertheless a digression from this indictment and will therefore be left to another time. Instead we will move on with the observations of economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

In “Romney pledges a Fed that will screw workers” posted on the Truthout website on Aug. 27^th, Baker detailed the ways that a strong (read overvalued) dollar results in lost manufacturing jobs and depressed wages in the United States, and a huge international trade deficit. But the strong dollar also confers enormous benefits on corporations and the wealthy.

“The arithmetic on this is striking. Productivity is projected to grow by more than 25 percent in the next decade. If workers get their share of productivity growth, this would imply an increase in annual income for the typical family of approximately $12,000 by 2022. On the other hand, with a Fed following Romney's strong dollar policy, workers in 2022 will be lucky if their wages are as high as they are today,” Baker wrote.

In furthering the indictment of Romney, it should be noted that Baker does not confine his scorn to Republicans, identifying Robert (“Wall Street”) Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, as a principal architect of strong dollar policy. “While the strong dollar may be a loser for most people, it does offer large benefits for people like Mitt Romney, Robert Rubin, and other members of the 1 percent,” Baker added.

“These people are all heavily involved in global business and their money goes further when buying into China, India, and elsewhere when the dollar is stronger.

"In addition, there are retail companies like Walmart that have set up low-cost supply chains in the developing world that depend on an overvalued dollar. Do you think they want to see the price of the goods they purchase overseas rise by 20 percent when measured in dollars? The same applies to manufacturing companies like General Electric, which produce most of what they sell in the United States overseas,” Baker continued.

Itemizing Romney’s obvious disinterest in the fate of so many people should not be concluded without a look at his apparent position on women and health care. Notwithstanding his obvious affection for his wife, Ann, whom he makes use of in his efforts to reach autoworkers (“my wife Ann owns two Cadillacs”), he seems unaware of the need to make policy for the majority of American households led by single moms or with both parents working.

“… the Republican Party [has] just spent two full years using their power across the country to get involved in women's medical decisions and gay people's lives, and ... Mitt Romney [has] repeatedly vowed to do the same if elected,” wrote Marge Baker, an executive vice-president at People for the American Way.

In “Romney toWomen: Stop worrying about your bodies and just trust me,” posted on the Huffington Post website, Baker added “Yes, the economy and jobs are hugely important issues in this election (though ones in which Romney doesn't exactly have an advantage). So is foreign policy, which one Romney advisor dismissed this week as a 'shiny object.' But so are the personal attacks that Romney and his allies are lobbing at women.”

There is much additional testimony that could be brought to bear for this indictment, but brevity matters and is sometimes decisive. The election likely will come long before Mitt Romney is called into court to face these charges. And the outcome of the election will likely make further action against Mitt a substantial waste of time and energy.

In the meantime, does anyone care to defend the guy who led a gang of school boys in an assault on an effeminate classmate, who went on vacation with his dog in a crate on the roof of his car, who includes a number of NASCAR owners among his good friends, and who has said that he would not lift a finger on behalf of 47 percent of the country? If so, please respond on this site.