There Once Was a Union Maid, But She Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Just home from the theatre and checking my computer one more time before going to bed, and there's this link from my friends at New York's Working Families Party, one of the few bright spots on the USA's political landscape now that Russ Feingold's not in office, and here it is for you too now:

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/06/30/a_wageless_profitable_recovery.html

Taegan Goddard's Political Wire is one of the most reliable sources for solid, factual political reportage on the internet. I know this because my son told me. Without divulging my son's identity, I can assure you his word is, well, good as silver. Gold is apparently not the thing to value any more.

Yes, folks, it seems to be true: "corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income" during our recent "recovery." I doubt that any of you reading this are much surprised, whether or not you pay much attention to the fact that the banks and brokerages we bailed out with our hard-earned dollars basically put the money straight into the silk pockets of their CEOs, whether or not you care that more American families are falling into poverty, that we are dishing out more for gasoline while the profits of oil companies keep going up and up and up. Fact is, no matter whose figures and what analysis you deem important and/or credible, I'd guess that you, like me, are feeling worse off financially today than you were a year ago and probably much worse off than you were two years ago.

I was leafing through a magazine yesterday and found myself staring at a full page ad from a local car dealership trumpeting the fact that "Everyone can afford $250 a month." But they're wrong. We can't. If my car quit working, I would not be able to replace it. I'm not even sure I can afford to take it in for its routine maintenance now due. There is no extra $250 a month to spend on a car or a new furnace or getting the dishwasher fixed. And the ironic thing about this all is that I'm actually doing well by almost anyone's standards. I own a nice house (even if it needs lots of repair), I have a functioning car (with 100,000 miles), I have a fairly nice and secure job, and my children have finished college. What I have is not only out of reach for most of the world's population, it is out of sight for most of the world's population. But this, after all, is America.

Indeed. It is, in a word, advanced capitalism. People in parts of the world where capitalism is just hitting its stride, places like India and China, should be watching what is happening here with interest and some alarm. This is, after all, where they're heading, and it is not a beautiful meadow with wild animals and blue skies and wildflowers so thick they make you wince to traipse through them on brilliant summertime mornings when the dew is still fresh on their petals.

No. Corporate profits are up. Living standards are down. The gap between rich and poor is widening, as more and more of the former working/middle class are slowly dragged into the spreading puddle of the poor. Not even my former trade union seems to understand the real impact of this change. My union was broken this winter here in Wisconsin, and while tens of thousands of us, union members from all over this once-progressive state, converged on our state capitol to protest this, my union made tee shirts to sell to its members and agreed to a monstrous cut in our wages and benefits without even consulting us, its members. They completely missed the opportunity to use their only real tool: The strike. It could have been a general strike, but it wasn't even a local strike. And now, as of yesterday, they lost the right to represent me. They can no longer collect dues from me. And you know what? I don't even care. They lost me when they failed to refuse to comply with the governor who just successfully emasculated them.

And in case you want to see what happens when trade unionists aren't afraid to speak up, go to Four Star Video here in Madison or (sigh!) order it up on Netflix: "Made in Dagenham." Lovely, heartening movie from England.

After the Meal's Done, the Poem's Still Incomplete

Dinner went too late tonight, and my brain's too tired to write a blog of my own, so let me give you someone wiser better more poetic. I spent a part of my day at the office today (don't tell anyone!) looking up poems by this man because I've been thinking about poems and been thinking about Palestine and thinking about a young man named Vittorio Arrigoni who died there this year (along with many others, unnamed, but he was Italian and so the world deigns to name him), and so here is a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, in translation, which follows closely upon my dinner conversation tonight about the difficulties and the dangers of translating poetic thought, which includes both the Bible and the Quran, into languages other than those of their original formation, and in many cases, takes away the mystery and thrill of the oral presentation to the flat rendering of print on a page. But I think this is a nice translation, and my criterion, if you would know it, is simply that it brings beauty and wisdom to its syllables, and I suspect that Mr. Darwish might have found that sufficient.

This blog is dedicated to my dinner guests: Marilyn and Georgy and Leigh. What a fine dinner table we made.


To a Young Poet
By Mahmoud Darwish
Translated By Fady Joudah

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.

If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.

Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.

Truth is white, write over it
with a crow’s ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage’s light.

If you want to duel with a falcon
soar with the falcon.

If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
who desires his end.

Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health.

If you ponder a rose for too long
you won’t budge in a storm.

You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.

You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.

One thousand birds in the hand
don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.

A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.

Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.

Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,
follow it before you reach your path.

Don’t tell the beloved, you are I
and I am you, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.

Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.

Don’t place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.

Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan’s trace.

A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart
a deadly wisdom.
Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.

The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.

Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children’s graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers’ navels.

You won’t disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.

From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.

Don’t think, when you
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition’s light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?

The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.

No advice in love. It’s experience.
No advice in poetry. It’s talent.

And last but not least, Salaam.

Back in the US of A Don't Know How Lucky U R

I guess you can tell if you scan my recent posts that I am still thinking a lot about my experience in Egypt. It was my first time visiting any country south of the Mediterranean and my first time in a place where I didn't speak the language and my first experience in an Arab nation, so I guess it's understandable and perhaps even good that my two weeks rocked my world. I would not have it otherwise. I didn't even visit the pyramids, but I had such a great opportunity to spend time with everyday Egyptians that to spend time with tour guides just didn't hold appeal. Maybe I'll go back when I'm 80 and sign on to a tour bus group that will take me straight from the airport to the pyramids, maybe even let me pose on a camel's back. The only camels I saw were loose in the streets of Nuweiba, wandering freely, eating out of the town's open dumpsters before heading home to sleep.

I prepared for my visit by reading all the Egyptian novels I could cram in, almost all of Mahfouz and a major selection of Aswany. It turned out to be a really great preparation. Today, my hair stylist, working diligently to repair my travel's double devastation of the desert's sun and the sea's salt, asked me if I'd ever felt real culture shock. I thought about it, thought about the women in hijabs and birqas and the men in long, loose galabiyas, the bruises in the middle of the devout men's foreheads, the hookahs and the separation of the sexes, the crazy crazy traffic and the all-night bazaar life that substituted for nightclub life, and I had to answer, "No, not really." Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction can be more informative than truth.

Now that I'm back, I'm rereading a lot, mostly archives of the articles about the revolution that make more sense after having crossed Cairo's bridges and walked around Tahrir Square. I'm reading more non-fiction now: Aswany again, but his pre and post revolution collection of essays this time, "The State of Egypt." And a book I heard about right before I left and ordered right after my return was waiting in my mailbox today after work: "Cairo: The City Victorious."

Travel is not just tourist sites and postcards, not just collecting souvenirs. Travel is a quest for understanding another place, another people, another way of life. I am still on my quest, even though I'm back in Wisconsin, where democracy is just as precious and precarious as it is elsewhere, as our friends in Egypt are now experiencing. Here, democracy is just looking a little less inviting and exciting than it is in Cairo, with a careless Republican government fully installed and controlling the conditions of our daily lives with as little regard for diverse opinions as well, any deposed Egyptian tyrant. Thank goodness state's here don't control the military nor even most levels of law enforcement. That may prove the essential diffence.

The Big Screen and the Capitol Building

The Wisconsin State Capitol lies pretty much on a straight line between my office and my home, and for the nearly three years I've lived and worked here in Madison, it's been one of my many small, sustaining pleasures to cut through the capitol building on my walks home. It's a really magnificent building, and it always make me feel a little taller, a little braver, and a little better to walk through it somehow.



Do real cops wear T shirts with printed badges?

 But this winter changed all that. The Republican governor who was inaugurated in January had the capitol sealed off when thousands of Wisconsinites began regular protests around and in the building, decrying Scott Walker's stated goal of taking away collective bargaining rights from public service workers in our state. One door was left unbolted of the score of doors that are usually wide open, and if you were determined to enter by that one door, you were greeted by ostensible law enforcement officers of sometimes indeterminate affiliation, made to empty your bags, packs and

Now THESE are real cops: the Patrol!

pockets with a thoroughness and a lack of good humor that TSA would do well to imitate.


 The last time I tried it, halfway into the ritual of dumping my pens and and pins and private belongings into plastic bins for these strangely unidentified men to inspect, I realized I was about to start crying. I refused. I grabbed back everything I had already deposited, told the unsmiling men, "I hate how you're doing this; I really hate how you've destroyed the civilian atmosphere of this building," and I ran back through the metal detectors and out of the building.

Today, for the first time since then, on an absolutely beautiful day toward the end of June, nearly four months to the day since we were surprised on February 28 to find the entire capitol in lockdown despite a promise to open it after what was to be a temporary closing for cleaning it after many days of protests, today I got to walk freely through my House again. During those four months, I felt seriously depressed every time I walked around the Capitol Square. To see the doors shut against the people the building proposes to serve provided a gut wrenching reminder of the fact that the present state government did not even pretend to be interested in serving me, or any of the 49 percent of the voters who are reliably Democratic right now. Republicans thoroughly control both the Assembly and the Senate, as well as the Governor's Office, and, most cruelly of all, the State Supreme Court, once naively assumed to be a chamber where party affiliation was not relevant. If you live in Wisconsin, you know all this. If you live elsewhere in the States, but are politically active or involved in labor issues, you probably know this too. Developments here got quite a lot of press this winter, most of it as outrageously slanted as our alleged representatives here.

But today I got to walk straight up the stairs to the big revolving doors and enter the high cool hallways of my  beloved state capitol. I sensed a knot begin to dissolve a little in my chest, a knot that has felt oddly like a clenched fist instead of a heart pounding inside me. But I vow not to forget. Today, the Capitol was reopened because Governor Walker signed the state's new budget into law this weekend, a budget that is built on the premise that the rich deserve more, that the poor deserve nothing, and that the working class, the middle class is too concerned with reality television to bother with reality of class issues and public education.

Perhaps the governor's right. I have become a little more cynical since we lost our noble efforts to influence public opinion enough to alter the shape of our state's financial future. An article in the New York Times yesterday detailed how the boxes that Americans use to deliver cable signals to their televisions consume more energy in our homes than our refrigerators and in some cases even more than our air conditioning systems. Perhaps we do care more about reality TV than reality. Perhaps I'd better subscribe to cable and see what the hokey-pokey's all about.

The Revolution of Hand Holding

Back in the seventies, when everyone with a heart was a radical leftist and we still thought Mao was a hero even though we all knew the murals and posters of the Chinese Communists were never going to hold a candle to the artwork of the ancients, my friend Mona got to go to visit there with the very first group of Americans allowed entrance. Mona, you must understand, had been wearing a Mao cap and jacket for several years already, along with those flat little archless MaryJanes on her feet. She'd been learning Chinese. She was, in short, eager as they come.

But it was, after all, the seventies, and we were not only radical leftists with heart, we were hippies and we were still  young, and sex and love were probably the ony two agenda items that beat out world peace and freedom on our agenda. So when Mona reluctantly returned from her long-anticipated visit to the culture that would set a model for the rest of humanity (yes, we are indeed talking about China...there was a point when we thought they were actually heading toward freedom), the first thing she had to tell us was this and it has long since surpassed anything else my friend told us that may have had political value: "They don't even hold hands on the streets in China!" Mona's current boyfriend was also on the trip. I'm sure the two of them scandalized most of Peking, as it was still known then.

Now it's 2011. So much has changed. Hippies are pretty much gone, except for a handful of scrawny men with scrawnier gray ponytails aimlessly wandering around Berkeley and Madison and Santa Cruz still; China has not only moved beyond Mao, they have become a model of Western industry, complete with all the environmental hazards inherent in that. And in Egypt, lovers still can't kiss in public, can't spend the night with each other, can't acknowledge homosexuality which, as I've said previously, "doesn't even exist." Egypt may not be ruled strictly by sharia law, but there is still a surprising amount of enforcement of sexual mores in both the cities as well as the desert. I guess it gives the huge police force something to enforce. In a nation where drinking is also frowned upon, if not outright banned, and traffic laws are absolutely non-existent, there can be so little for police to do with their authority.

It's serious. Doormen and porters are the primary enforcers of the code that prevents premarital sex, and in hotels, even the big Western hotels, you must show proof of marriage to be given a room with someone of the opposite sex. I don't imagine they would ask two men for this, but then, remember: homosexuality doesn't exist in Egypt. Bowabs, as we non-Arabic speakers, muddle their proper Arabic title, can make or break a romance and make or break your budget. During the corrupt reign of Hosni Mubarak, they were part of a deep and sinister chain of informants that kept Egyptians docile and compliant. What role they play in post-revolutionary Egypt remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, I don't recommend you go kissing your honey in the streets of Cairo or even on the beaches of the Red Sea. Someone may still be watching you. But take heart: It's okay to hold hands here.

It's a Man's World (cont'd)

A few hours after deplaning and my first awestruck encounter with a fully Muslimized woman, I was whizzing through the dizzy traffic of Cairo on a Friday night after prayers, when everyone is out and everyone is at their best (no accident the revolution had its highest moments on Fridays after prayers...the whole population, er, 90 percent of the population to be exact, is holy and ready for miracles on Friday evenings), while my driver had his head stuck out of the car window to conduct one of the 38 conversations he would have with his fellow Cairean drivers that night, I noticed the following. It will rest forever in my mind snuggled right next to the image of the woman in head to toe black waiting outside customs.

Two boys, not yet truly young men, but aiming diligently at that noble goal, walking together down the crowded street. They were probably thirteen years old, by most Arab standards, men, meaning they were mature enough to be considered threats to unveiled women, would not, hence, be allowed easy access to classrooms of girls, share food at weddings with girls, see the skin of no females until marriage if they were devout, except their mothers and their sisters. You know the age: When puberty has gained the upper hand, no longer takes the boy by surprise. Whiskers are sprouting on upper lips, if irregularly; perspiration has taken on a new pungency. And somehow, in any culture I have ever witnessed, the stride of the boy has changed, a little longer, a little more from the hip. So we have two boys, on the cusp of sexual maturity, where they will balance with more or less  ease, depending on their religious values, their family ties, their imaginations for another few years or so. And these two boys, in Cairo in June of 2011, post revolutionary Cairo, are wearing completely matching ensembles that remind me immediately and uncannily of the beautiful boy in the filmed version of "Death in Venice," the blonde boy with the striped shirt. They are holding hands and walking with their new man-stride down the crowded street, dressed for the night, dressed to impress, holding hands and walking on a Friday evening after prayers. I am the only one who notices, except my daughter. The Egyptian who is driving, a deep and dear friend of ours, doesn't seem to understand why we even remark upon the boys.

You see, this is so much a man's world, a world where homosexuality has for so long been so denied, hidden, subversive no one can readily understand how standards of affection and affiliation between men are different here than elsewhere in the industrialized world. Men spend their deepest lives with men here. The division between the sexes is so deep and wide they don't even often see the other side. And before Mubarak, there was a long period of time when it wasn't like this, when men and women mixed, when women didn't have to hide themselves from view. Mubarak was smart enough to know that increasing Islamic fundamentalism would serve his reign well. Over the course of his cruel dominion, women lost a lot of freedom and men returned to the ways of their great grandfathers. Our friend the native Cairean told us about how his mom used to wear miniskirts. Now, both she and his sisters are veiled.

In the USA, we call this kind of sexual separation a fact of life only in the Board Room, where life is still a man's world.

It's a Mad, Man's World

There is no homosexuality in the Islamic world, well, you know what I mean: There is no blatant homosexuality in the Islamic world, well, you know what I mean: There is no blatant homosexuality in the Islamic world unless you know where to look. And this goes for both men and women.

The Islamic world, it's no secret, is a man's world. Wait. Let me correct that. The world is a man's world. There is not a place on the globe with a population of greater than 100 that is not a man's world. But in most parts of this man's world, a woman can wear (pretty much) what she likes and can afford, she can go (pretty much) where she chooses and can afford, and she can say (pretty much) what she wants, even if that voice comes in the form of a ballot.

The first person I saw after I passed through customs in Cairo was a woman (I have to assume) in the long black robe and head covering we call a birqua, a rather radical birqua at that, having even the small slit that is usually left open for her eyes covered with piece of black fabric which I hope was transparent from the inside as it certainly was not from the outside. This was my first visit to Egypt. I'd come prepared for more conservative dressing in Cairo, but nothing really prepares you to find that it's real and it's thorough. I noticed that even the woman's hands were covered; she wore black gloves that went to her elbows. When she walked, and her robes swung, I saw that her ankles were covered in what appeared to be beautiful black shaded stockings. Fascinated, I had to almost physically restrain myself from reaching out to touch the soft folds of the burqua's cloth. It looked irresistibly soft, reminding me of the skin of the bat ray in the open tank at the Monterrey aquarium, which is, to date, the most remarkable surface I've ever had the pleasure to be able to touch with my eager fingertips.

Tell a modern Cairean man anything about how Egyptian women are subservient, and he will probably laugh at you. "They dress as they do out of free choice," you will almost assuredly be told. "No Egyptian man can tell an Egyptian woman what to do. He would not eat for weeks if he tried." Even in that statement, something makes me cringe. No one seems to care that there is an implicit suggestion therein that it will be the woman who is making sure there is food on the family's table. And definitely they do not want to hear this from me, the blonde, blue-eyed, wide-eyed Americana.

This is a man's world. Here, unlike some countries where the Quran is more important than the Constitution or where the Quran IS the constitution, women can vote, can drive, are required to attend school for as many years as their brothers. Women are engineers, doctors, lawyers, and mothers. But this is a man's world. Go into any of the teeny tiny shops that line Cairo's teeming streets, and even if it is a woman's clothing store, there will be a man in charge. He is usually sitting. Sitting with his four closest friends, all of whom are now silently assessing me, without a smile, without a single sign of interest, without a greeting. If there is a woman in the shop, she may approach and if she does, I will probably even be awarded a smile that somehow seems real to me. But the team of men, two of whom are probably smoking sisha, one of whom is thumbing through a wellworn copy of the Quran, and one whose eyes very rarely move from the cash register, just watch me. Only one works here. The others, his buddies and or brothers and or sons, are here to bolster him. This is life in the Societe des Cafes. Every shop here is a mosque and a teahouse.

(to be continued)

Letters, Redux

After a really long hiatus, I'm giving this blog another go. It's been over a year since my last posting. It's been a tumultuous year. I am not just older, I am changed. My mother died and I did not, my youngest child graduated and moved to DC and I did not, my daughter moved to Egypt and I did not. But I learned from everything. There was the revolution in Egypt and a failed democratic movement right here in Madison. The two had many similarities, many differences. I studied both quite closely. I made many new and wonderful friends, from all parts of the world, some right here in Wisconsin, some very far away. I wrote poems and rediscovered painting. I mourned my mom and tried to find within myself a residue of her spirit and the joy she held onto even as death cruelly, cruelly claimed her. I went to Egypt and experienced life in a third world country seeking to reinvent itself. It was a revolution for me as well as the people who lived there. I will see what I have to say now. Welcome back, Russ Feingold.