I was even more focused on my script, Waiting for Gordo, a South Texas adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s classic that I had set on the border, not far from where I am writing this week on the Rio Grande River in and around Laredo. Gordo was a small effort to personalize a story that is too often dehumanized and always politicized.

A decade later, the eight candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination – arguing like an octopus turned on itself – are arguing about border immigration and freeloading illegals in the same tone I was hearing then.  I’m not going to hold my breath for a solution, but I have learned this week that border intervention is a huge business and not likely to ever become a smaller one. It’s been an honor to look for a little understanding of border issues in the company of Time Magazine’s Joe Klein and one of the greatest and bravest photographers of our time, Lynsey Addario. Watch for Joe’s stories and Lynsey’s photos on Joe’s Swampland Blog and in Time Magazine for the next month.

But first, here’s my Slate Diary Blog from soon after 9-11 – a time capsule to a me that I hope I can hold onto.

The beauty of being a free-lance writer is you get to pick your subjects, themes, and characters. Unless they pick you. The age-old dictum, of course, is to “write what you know,” a philosophy that works for a time, though I wouldn’t recommend it as a tattoo. Much better to write what you learn.

Foremost, I learned that my daughter is not the only one plagued by dreams hanging on our fears of a darkness that threatens to envelop the earth. This morning, one person after another related their sleepless experiences until it seemed like half of America must have awakened at 4 a.m. from what I can only describe as a collective nightmare. Oh, if this war were only a dream, how sweet would be our waking tomorrow.

One thing I learned in that quest today, learned and relearned as I have to learn nearly every day, is the aspiration to write simply. Misquoting Faulkner—but raising a glass to his spirit—my goal is to write from the heart, not from the balls or brains (though those can be handy in a pinch).

A few years ago, while a guest on Sky TV’s literary talk show from London, I was talking with Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass series and other timeless tomes. Pullman is a former schoolteacher who started quite a row in the literary world by saying the art of storytelling had been foolishly devalued by hip literary stylists. I believe Martin Amis was one name that he singled out, though I don’t intend to reduce one great writer to hoist up another. But I do think Pullman was right to wonder if the literary hipsters weren’t forgetting to give something back to their readers.

I later shared a few ales and words on this subject with Richard Cohen, the British publisher of my novel, Fast Greens, which I was promoting at the time. Richard fell more into the Pullman camp than the Amis, saying that he had once worked for a marvelous publisher who only asked one question when Richard found a novel that he wanted to publish. “Did itmove you?”

Cohen also gave me a piece of advice I’ve carried ever since. One of the advantages of being a Southern writer (or a Texas writer), he said, is that the innate style and language of our region enables us to write close against the line of sentimentality. (He neglected, however, to mention the Sisyphean nature of defining the line that separates sentiment in its true light from blatant sentimentality.)

A couple of years ago, I wrote one of those little Christmas novels that a cynic might think the product of monetary desperation. But this was a story that chose me. I’d been thinking of writing something for my family’s Christmas but had no solid ideas. Then one morning I awoke from a late night’s reverie and began to write. Twenty days later, I stopped writing and sent the book to my friends and family as a Christmas present. One week more, and the editor of Algonquin Books called to say she’d like to publish When Angels Sing, which most critics lauded as a heartfelt story simply told. But two critics (fans of Martin Amis, I imagined) absolutely loathed my story of a man who had to shed his hatred of Christmas in order to hold the love of his son.

I dashed off irate letters to these reviewers—letters I later regretted, learning the hard way that it’s better to offer thanks to those who give us praise. I also learned a more valuable lesson—that we can’t make the entire world into what we want it to be. The writer’s job, if you put your faith in the verities of old, is to shine a light on what is already there. To help us all awaken from the dream within a dream so that someday we may realize the dreams within our hearts.

Samuel Johnson wrote that we tell each other stories in an attempt to be made whole. Through storytelling we reveal who we are at the core; through storytelling we lay bare the hearts and souls of humankind, 6 billion people whose DNA can all be traced to a handful of common ancestors. Can there be any wonder that we share the same dreams?

So let me tell you a story from the set of Going to California—a story that even a sentimental writer wouldn’t have the balls to make up. In my episode, “Waiting for Gordo,” the two guest roles are Pucho and Fortunato, Latino characters inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Pozzo and his slave, Lucky. As the coyote Pucho, we enthusiastically cast Tony Amendola, the kind of actor you always dream will say your words. A man of infinite moods, Tony moves so deftly from darkness to light and back again that I wish I could be his full-time scribe, following close behind and whispering everyday lines into his ear just to hear him make me sound brilliant.

More important to today’s story, though, is the young man cast as Fortunato. The show’s producers knew only that on videotape, Bernardo Verdugo seemed to be an angelic natural as an illegal alien who is discovered in the trunk of a car where he has been locked by a coyote. Like so many people from so many parts of the world, Fortunato’s great aspiration is to come to freedom, to make a new life in America. After the first few scenes this morning, I complimented Bernardo on his performance, and he said that it was not a difficult part for him. Six years ago, well before he got his green card and residency in the United States, Bernardo was brought to America by a coyote.

“How did you cross the border?” I asked.

“Locked in the trunk of a car,” he said.

And then I watched him climb back into the trunk of a car. The lid slammed shut, and I thought of him there in the darkness, wondering what awaited him. Cameras rolled and our director softly said, “Action.” As the trunk came open, the sun peeked out from behind a tall cloud, and long rays of light shone in upon the face of Bernardo Verdugo.

And on a film set high atop a hill on a ranch outside of Austin, the shared dreams of a young man from Mexico and a writer from Texas came true.

We finished the scene to everyone’s delight, then the sun slipped back behind the clouds. That’s when I heard someone say, “We need more light.”

Related Articles:

• No Related Related

Turk Pipkin: In the days before everyone’s grandmother had a blog, the Slate Diaries were one of the internet’s greatest outlets for interesting writing from widely disparate voices. I was asked by Slate to be a weekly diarist a month before 9/11, and when I scheduled my week for early October, I couldn’t have anticipated that America and the world would be in such a soul-searching and somber mood. Rereading this story is a great reminder of the life I used to live, of the lives many of us lived in the decade before 9/11 when the economy was fairly good and the worst thing the fine members of America’s Congress could imagine was a blow job.

A decade later, we’ve blown three trillion dollars in two lost wars, bailed out billionaires with government money while hard-working men and women discovered that the hardest thing about work is finding it. For a few weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, we had the whole world with us, but we blew it all away with hubris, lies and a ten-year battle without end that has destroyed far too many lives and has fractured America into groups that are unable to recognize their common ground because of the massive focus placed on their differences.

 Frustrated at America’s response to 9/11, my wife and I ended up founding The Nobelity Project and, like so many people who care about a better way ahead, are trying our best to be a positive force in a world that needs us all. Here’s my Slate diary from October 8, 2010.

It was a beautiful weekend. There was a chill in the air, and the monarch butterflies were winging their way to Mexico. I set all my writing aside, left my computer at home, and drove with my wife and kids to the Texas Hill Country, where I’ve been building a cabin overlooking the Llano River. Every trip I make to the river is a pilgrimage, for I spent much of my childhood at my grandmother’s ranch on the river’s headwaters—wading, swimming, and fishing in the cold spring water that eventually runs over the granite outcroppings at the property we now own. My family lost my grandmother’s ranch when I was in high school, and I spent the next 30 years trying to figure out how to get back a piece of the river.

But as a comedian, then a free-lance writer of books and television, the price of waterfront land was always just out of my reach. Whenever I started to make more money, the prices went up. Then on Valentine’s Day, 2000, while I was writing a magazine story in Belize, my wife sent me an e-mail saying her mammogram had shown something suspicious. I came home to a diagnosis of DCIS—Ductal Carcinoma In Situ. We went from doctor to doctor and the word “mastectomy” kept hitting us like a hammer. Eighteen months later, I still couldn’t say which one of us was more scared.

Running from what we could not escape, one day we dropped the kids at school and headed for the river, driving on back-country roads till we came to a low-water crossing built by German settlers in the 19th century. In the space of one day, we fell in love with the land overlooking that crossing, learned it was for sale, and made an offer to buy it. Eighteen months later—with my wife having beaten her breast cancer and having begun teaching yoga for a living—the river has become a central part of our lives.

We have no television or radio at the cabin; it’s too good here for all that. This weekend, with the wind blowing cool out of the north, we built a campfire in the late afternoon, then grilled steaks and vegetables by the light of an orange and violet sunset. Within an hour, the sky was brilliant with stars, the Milky Way shining bright from horizon to horizon. Just before bedtime, my daughters and I looked up and all saw the same shooting star.

It’s never easy for me to escape my work. People tell me they envy my carefree life as a writer, but they don’t have any idea how hard I have to work to keep from having a job. To cobble together one real income, I write for television, film, magazines, and try to turn out a book every couple of years. That means long, butt-throbbing hours at my desk and very short nights in bed. It’ll be a miracle if I get any writing done this week. A one-hour episode I wrote for a great new Showtime series—Going to California—will be filming in Austin, and I’m hoping to see as much of the action as possible. I’ll also be working on a documentary on Willie Nelson for American Masters on PBS, and I’m moderating panels and hosting events at one of my favorite events of the year, the Austin Film Festival.

At last year’s festival, I chaired a panel with David Chase, the creator and executive producer of HBO’s hit, The Sopranos. Before the panel, we talked a bit about my experiences in Italy interviewing lawyers and hitmen for the ‘Ndrangetta, the fearful Calabrian mafia. When the panel started, David was looking at me kind of funny, and I thought I must have said something wrong. Far from it—a couple of days later, the casting director of The Sopranos called to see if I’d videotape an audition for the show. The role was a total hoot—the born-again, narcoleptic boyfriend of Tony’s sister Janice. They faxed the script, I sent back a tape, and a couple of weeks later I was in Queens falling asleep on Tony Soprano’s shoulder and having him bounce walnuts off my sleeping noggin at the Sopranos’ Thanksgiving dinner.

For a writer whose future depends to a great extent on a larger audience discovering his work, this tiny brush with fame was a dream come true. All the better when the show brought me back for a couple more episodes, giving me some fun scenes with Aida Turturro, a wonderful actress who makes Janice one of The Sopranos‘ most memorable characters. When Aida was nominated for an Emmy for her work this year, I felt sure I’d soon be in front of the TV watching her accept her award.

NYC skyline and sunset from La Guardia just before 9/11

Then came Sept. 11. The week after the bombings, I could not look away from the television. I had to know everything, had to e-mail everyone I knew. For some reason, I felt a compulsion to be a reassuring voice, to tell my friends and family that somehow everything would be OK. A lot of nice words came back for my efforts, but I also got the worst possible news from too many friends whose family members, business associates, and college buddies had been in the Trade Centers. On one of my trips to film The Sopranos, I’d taken my 10-year-old daughter to the top of the World Trade Center. Now she wanted to know about the people we’d seen there, and what would happen to the children of those people who’d died. My voice began to sound less and less reassuring. And our refuge at the river began to seem more and more important.

It was still cool this morning when we hiked down the granite point to the river’s edge. It was a little late in the year for a swim, but I waded in till my knees were wet, decided it was too cold, and turned back to shore. Then I slipped on the slick rock, and the river gave me my baptism anyway. Once I was wet, I went ahead a paddled around in what turned out to be the best swim of the year. And then I headed back to Austin to watch Aida win her award.

It was a beautiful weekend, but then I turned on the TV. America Strikes Back was a harsh return to reality. The awards, of course, were pushed from our concerns, and the war had started without me. Now I find myself trying to remember my long-ago friends, David and Lynn Angell, who died on American Flight 11; find myself trying to imagine rushing to the rescue of innocent men, women, and children, knowing you might never return, or what it must be like to be under bombs and missiles raining down from the sky. I try to think of all the things we need to think of when our country is at war, but instead my mind keeps returning to the monarchs, their orange and black wings brilliant in the sun as they fly unknowing across the borders of man in their ancient pilgrimage of life.

And the week is just beginning.

Learn more about The Nobelity Project and watch the trailer for Building Hope at: www.nobelity.org

I’ll try to update some of the other diaries this week, but in the meantime, all five of my daily posts from the week are archived at: http://www.slate.com/id/116912/entry/116920/

Related Articles:

• Willie Nelson, America’s Voice in the wake of 9-11

This isn’t likely to change the minds of the bigots, though. They live in a zero sum universe. If someone of slightly different appearance is driving a nice car, they assume it’s a nice car that should be their own but isn’t because the undeserving person of slightly disappearance got it through theft or government hand-out.

Here’s the story.

Here’s how WPost’s Ezra Klein summed it up:

So Texas, with its booming economy, may have more to benefit from with its large immigrant population, both illegal and illegal. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that all states would immediately benefit from a big influx of immigrant workers.

Related Articles:

• Aristotle and the Cyberpoke
• Contempt for Democracy: Attacks on Voting Rights
• Possible Arson and the Right’s Houston Voter Suppression Effort
• Bars for BP
• When Johnny Came Home

–Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn, in the novel, True Grit.

“He is not my friend.”

–Young Mattie Ross, speaking of Rooster Cogburn, in True Grit.

The American myth of the rugged, self-sufficient individual is ever-present in our culture. Think of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, a character based on the nameless “Continental Op” of Dashiell Hammett’s noir thriller, Red Harvest. The characters abandon the very concept of community. They no longer even want a name that could be known by others.

The myth, of course, is just a fictionalized reflection of a belief held by many Americans: the self-contained individual is all. The furtherance of individual liberty, with little regard for the fate of the community at large, is the only legitimate role of government. The belief comes with magical thinking (or cynical slight-of-hand) that unrestrained selfishness will produce more for all than selflessness, altruism, or compassion.

Charles Portis’s True Grit and the 2010 film version by the Coen Brothers turn the myth on its head. In the process, the works tell us something about loneliness, inequality and the pursuit of friendship in contemporary America. We can look at the “true grit” of the book and movie as a reference to the courage to befriend others selflessly despite differences and barriers.

Friendship, in the sense of a durable bond of deep affection achieved without regard for utilitarian gain, lives an uneasy life in America. Aristotle believed deep friendship is a cornerstone of democracy because it establishes a moral model for relations within the City. It acknowledges our essential human equality and interdependence.

The Enlightenment, for all its many benefits, dispensed with ideas about the moral or political importance of friendship, or sympathy, or empathy. Kant was especially keen to separate his moral imperative from squishy emotional attachment. That view gets human nature wrong, of course. We know that now thanks to advances in the human sciences, which reveal that we are born to be friends.

Democracy can’t survive as blood sport; it is a stranger to the dog-eat-dog fighting pit. I think our current economic difficulties offer evidence aplenty.

What does True Grit have to say about all this? Surely most of us are familiar with the story. In the 1870’s, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross hires the crusty and cantankerous Rooster Cogburn to help her track down and kill or capture her father’s murderer. A middle-aged Mattie narrates the story of her past. In the course of their adventures, the wild and wooly Rooster develops a deep affection for Mattie. And Mattie, after a fashion, reciprocates.

As written by Portis, though, the characters depart from the usual American melodrama. Mattie is no picture of innocence. She’s all about vengeance. Mattie’s a fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian who reduces her relationships to utilitarian cash calculations. Rooster manages to open her heart a bit, and we love her because this spark lives in her. At one point in the book, the adult Mattie acknowledges the inhumanity of her faith in Election (humans are fallen and can’t do anything about it; God decides or elects the saved).

I confess [Election] is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it.

Rooster is distant and uninterested in Mattie at first. He gets involved for the possible reward money. He’s lonely, though, and as they ride along, Rooster can’t help but tell stories of his past broken relationships and lost friends. In the end, the villains are vanquished. But Mattie has been bitten by a rattlesnake. Rooster, in an almost impossible act of love and endurance that kills Mattie’s horse and almost kills him, saves her life with a heroic journey to a faraway doctor. Mattie thinks of true grit as a blinkered, world-be-damned determination. Turns out to have more to do with love and friendship.

The budding friendship doesn’t last beyond the adventure, except, maybe, in their hearts. A quarter century later, Mattie hears that Rooster is appearing in a Wild West Show in Memphis. When she arrives to visit him there, she discovers he died three days earlier, of something he called “night hoss.” It’s a cowboy reference to nervous ponies that keep them awake at night. (Early in the novel Rooster says he has no such regrets: “I sleep like a baby. Have for years.”). Despite that bluster, Rooster’s night hosses are likely the loss of friendship and connection he’s suffered. He’s died of a perpetually broken heart.

For her part, Mattie has never married, and from her tone, never made another friend. Hers is a cautionary tale.

The Coen brothers and their longtime composer-collaborator Carter Burwell accent the theme with a beautiful score based on 19^th Century Christian hymns. By choosing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” the filmmakers manage sly references to two very different American movies, 1943’s The Human Comedy and 1955’s Night of the Hunter. Frank Rich described the story of The Human Comedy as a “Whitmanesque vision of the country…a fairy tale dream of democracy.”

In Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum plays a sociopath, a serial killer on the trail of two children. In the former film is the promise of community; in the latter, the psychopathology of the loner – the rugged individual in the extreme.

Like True Grit, both movies involve children’s tragic losses. And both employ the song, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” As used in True Grit, the song evokes Mattie’s faith. At the same time, the “everlasting arms” also seem to refer not to God, but to a faith in fellow humans. The last time we hear it, before the credits, the snake-bit Mattie is literally in Rooster’s arms.

By mixing up the standard narrative, Portis and the Coens awaken us to the promise – and the difficulty – of friendship in our American condition. They are telling a good yarn, but it’s a tale that subverts the romance of the rugged individual. It’s tragic that the tale can’t end happily. Today, such an ending wouldn’t ring true. Tomorrow, maybe, because like Rooster, a part of all of us knows there “is no beat of a good friend.”

Watch the clips of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” from both The Human Comedy (sung as a song of brotherhood and solidarity on a troop train) and Night of the Hunter (sung by the stalker Mitchum as a murderous taunt from the dark). Mitchum’s character, Harry Powell (a self-proclaimed preacher in the fire-and-brimstone tradition), has the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on the knuckles of his right and left hands, at the ends of his not-so-everlasting arms. These clips carry similar tattoos.

Related Articles:

• Aristotle and the Cyberpoke
• I Luv Video
• A Plutocratic Universe
• Two Wheels
• A Better Mouse Trap for the Age of Rats

These are times when bankers, like so many Snidely Whiplashes on steroids, are trying to take homes from people who don’t even have mortgages.

These are the times when public education, foundational to democracy, is under assault from profiteers who just have to get their hands on all that money, a move that would turn education over to the kinds of lawless people who are, well, foreclosing on homeowners who don’t have mortgages.

The same is true of Social Security, a successful citizen cooperative that goes a long way toward guaranteeing two of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: freedom from want and freedom from fear. Oh how the Wall Street bandits and buccaneers want to get their hands on that money – as if giving them the cash will make anyone but them more financially secure.

These are the times in which the courts say money is speech, so those with more money have more speech. Corporations are persons and they can spend all they want to buy elections, functionally disenfranchising individual working Americans. Campaign finance and disclosure laws, intended to help level the field, are failing and collapsing like weak levees before a terrible storm.

These are the times in which increasing wealth inequality makes the losers blame other losers (usually of different colors, religions or origins) for theft perpetrated by the rich. An alarming new study (pdf) shows that in times of rising inequality, the victims left at the bottom embrace the very policies that stripped them of their wealth. There’s no better analysis of 2010 election cycle:

…rising inequality in the United States has profound implications for political inequality, essentially creating a vicious cycle in which inequality begets yet more inequality.

These are the times that hopes for democracy have given way to the cruel, feudal dreams of yore.

These are the times when no one blinks as Glenn Beck claims (video) the soul-aware Thomas Paine, whose hatred for everything the Becks of the West stand for destroyed his career, was just an earlier version of Glenn Beck:

“Thomas Paine was kind of the…oh, I don’t know, ooh, my apologies to Thomas Paine, but kind of the Me of [the revolutionary] generation.”

About this time you’re wishing you were spending your time this particular moment on anything but contemplation of these times. Take heart. This battle’s been going on a long time, and our times are not so different from earlier times in American history.

Read this from historian H.W. Brands’ new book, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900:

“By the [19^th] century’s end the imperatives of capitalism mattered more to the daily existence of most Americans than the principles of democracy. The old forms of law and politics survived, not least since the capitalists couldn’t be bothered to change them. ‘What do I care about the law?’ bellowed Cornelius Vanderbilt. ‘Hain’t I got the power?’ He did have the power, and with it he and the other capitalists dominated American life.”

Well, today’s capitalists can and are bothered to change those principles of democracy. Hence, the Supreme Court’s willingness to turn over our lives to corporations – even foreign corporations. Hence, the decades-long effort at voter suppression. Hence, the shuttering of our courts under the ridiculous disguise of “tort reform.” Hence, the prison-industrial complex. Hence, the supremacy of Big Insurance.

If liberals made a mistake in 2008, it was the mistake of magical thinking. Winning a single election – regardless of who we sent to the plate – wasn’t going to change much in a fight that’s been underway for many lifetimes.

I am saddened to see the idiots like Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle be taken seriously by a media that has lost all judgment, all concern for the future of democracy, and any sense of responsibility, personal or institutional.

But hell, they’re just hacks. We are right to pin some hopes for democracy on freedom of speech. We are wrong to pin those hopes on the lapels of reporters. Very, very few have ever seen beyond their noses or cared, really, about their limitations.

This is going to be a long, long fight. Longer than we ever imagined. We may lose the last vestiges of democracy before we find another path up the mountain. We will find it.

Related Articles:

• Good Will, Good Faith, Good Grief
• Love and “Lost” in a Brokedown Palace
• A Plutocratic Universe
• America Regrets We’re Unable To Lunch Today
• Ayn Rand: “The Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions”

For want of a cat I turned, hose in hand, toward the house
and called,
“Come here dogs. Come get some treats! Animas. Piedra. Come!”
The black dog and the yellow dog looked up from their resting spots
in the shade of the porch, ears back, squinty eyes,
tails wagging in short, nervous sweeps.
Unmoving.
“Come on girls! I have some treats for you!”
They eyed me and the hose and my excited voice,
and turned and slunk up the back steps into the house
sure of a soaking.
“Animas! Piedra! Come! Treats! Damn dogs.”

“Useless dogs. Where am I going to find a cat?”
And soon. Two turned to ten turned to twenty with me standing over them
with my cold, drowning eviction notice drenching the neighborhood
turning them out on the town.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed one of our black australorp nearby.
“Here chick, chick, chick.”
She wandered toward me in her attentive, waddley way.
And noticed a mouse.
In feathery flash she was on the evictee, grabbed it in her beak,
smashed it to the ground a few times, stood up tall with the carcass dangling,
walked a few proud steps and swallowed it whole.
Just the tip of the tail sticking out of her mouth as the only reminder it had every existed
and then it was gone.

Goldie Hen Helps

In moments, the rest of the flock arrived,
heads low and stretched out in front of them, wings out to their sides with their powerful legs
driving them like a squadron of fighters on a strafing run.
And in a few seconds nine more mice became nothing more than tail tips between cruel beaks.
But the flood continued and so did the evacuees.
The hens were ready.
They hunted in teams. Some would pair up and push mice to one another.
Other battlefield tactics emerged.
I saw flanking formations, pressure lines, pincer movements.
Some would flush while others killed and when the killers consumed they flushed for the others.
One of the silver laced wyandottes was especially good at knocking off the mice
that tried to escape by climbing a piece of fence. I saw her do it at least three times
while her killing partner, Raggedy Anne a disheveled araucana, pounced on the fallen mice.

I lost track counting in those ten or fifteen minutes. More than fifty young mice,
damp victims of a soggy eviction were greeted by ten hens
without a survivor.
Like falling out of a boat into a shark feeding frenzy,
crawling out of your overturned jeep and being met by a pack of velociraptors
or getting kicked out of your home and running into a pack of loan collectors,
bankers and debt repayment officers.
There are dinosaurs among us. They didn’t die out.
We pluck them and grill them or fry them. We collect their eggs and eat them scrambled, over easy,
hard boiled or deviled.
Too bad bankers aren’t as useful or delicious.

Related Articles:

• No Related Related

Oh my mama told me
‘Cause she say she learned the hard way
She say she wanna spare the children
She say don’t give or sell your soul away
‘Cause all that you have is your soul

So don’t be tempted by the shiny apple
Don’t you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
‘Cause all that you have is your soul.

The sentiment above, expressed beautifully by singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman, goes to the heart of Americans’ self-image. In this nation, we tell ourselves, we are free to be true to our souls. I guess it all depends upon what you mean by “true” or “soul.”

Like the narrator’s mother in the song, we seem condemned to learn this truth the hard way, if we learn it at all. If the financial meltdown has not taught us anything else, it should teach us that there’s hell to pay when you sell your soul.

Jean Paul Sartre famously described hell as other people. I think, instead, that our soul is other people. Living within a Ayn Randian/Social Darwinist myth of the isolated individual versus the world, we exploit others for our own advantage. It’s our own souls that pay the price. By the way, Sartre always claimed he was misunderstood. He said:

It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.

I meet people from all walks of life and from all parts of the country who live as if they recognize this simple truth. Our everyday interactions with friends and strangers depend upon it. We give honest change at the bar. We hold doors open for the elderly and the frail (in the South, men still hold them open for women).

Collectively, though, we live by a dim and different light. Others are our competitors in a zero sum game. It’s insane, really. The devilish rich think they can run off with all the money. They shrug off 10 percent unemployment and all the suffering it causes, knowing all the while that it’s caused by their actions. They can’t run away with the money, though, ‘cause there’s nowhere for them to run. That’s Tracy Chapman’s lesson of the bitter fruit. Sartre’s, too.

In his song about a young boy’s friendship with an old oilfield roughneck, Guy Clark sings that they we’re “desperados waiting for a train.” He was on to something there. We live in the Land of the Pinkertons, and it often seems like love and friendship so threaten the Randians among them that those of us looking for a little kindness, love and justice are, of necessity, desperados.

The beautiful thing about Clark’s song is its unpretentious, down-home prairie humanism. The magic of life is in our relationship with others, especially others who never gave up on their souls, fortifying our own. People like the roughneck, who, Clark tells us, was “an old school man of the world” and a “hero of this country.”

The clip above is from an old Letterman broadcast. Singing with Nanci Griffith are Clark, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Rodney Crowell, Eric Taylor, Jerry Jeff Walker and the inimitable Steve Earle. I’ve been privileged to meet most of this gang. Some of ‘em I know pretty well. We ought to elect them all to Congress.

Hungering only for a taste of justice, only for a world of truth, one day we’re gonna elbow one another and say about the train we’ve been waiting on, “Come on Jack that son-of-a-bitch is coming.”

Related Articles:

• No Related Related

This world is rich, but it is not mine.
Where I live, hungry children are crying
I am not angry, at my own condition
I just want people to know my position.

Procol Harum, from a statement by South African Stephen Maboe

Congressman Joe Barton says he doesn’t want to live in a country in which those in authority are held accountable.

Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but I’m getting the spirit of his comments – and his beliefs – just right. He apologized to BP for the Obama Administration’s audacity and its demand that BP put $20 billion in escrow to compensate Americans devastated by the oil giant’s Gulf spill.

I’m only speaking for myself. I’m not speaking for anyone else, but I apologize,” Barton added. “I do not want to live in a county where anytime a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, [it is] subject to some sort of political pressure that, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown.

Other Republicans (John Cornyn, Michele Bachmann) shared Barton’s concerns. Some tried to distance themselves. Whatever.

The point is that Barton spoke from his heart. In the worldview of Barton and his ilk, humanity divides neatly into two categories: the ruled and the rulers. It is a violation of natural law to hold rulers accountable. Surviving fish do not punish sharks for the flounder they eat.

This is why the modern conservative movement sits so uneasily with democracy. When the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush president, it fit the natural order as seen by conservatives like Barton.

Most conservatives are not as stupid or as honest as Barton. They do not trot out their anti-democratic, authoritarian sentiments so readily. Instead, they hide behind democratic language, talk of the American Founders, etc. etc.

How is it that these people so detest the authority of elected, theoretically accountable government while believing that corporate authority is above the law, above reproach, above criticism? To them, all government is illegitimate, maybe especially democratic government in which the little fish can and sometimes do vote to restrain the sharks.

Sharks, in the oil patch or on Wall Street, are products of what the Bartons see as natural evolution. It’s social Darwinism made political doctrine. Further complicating the picture is the fact that most of them don’t like Darwin at all. Still, his thought is very useful to their political worldview even though it challenges their nutty religious dogma. So be it. Only a little fish would demand consistency from a shark.

The toxic BP oil spill is going to kill both the sharks and the fish, of course. But Barton is undeterred by this. He wants to save what sharks there are to be saved, especially, I guess, the British hammerhead, the one the real American Founders threw out of our waters 235 years ago.

This brings me to the powerful Procol Harum song quoted above, This World is Rich. Here are the rest of the lyrics (you can hear a clip or buy the song here):

This world is rich, but it is not mine
My people are starving, that must be a crime
When some have so much, and some have so little
There must be a place, we can meet in the middle

This world is rich, but it is not mine
This world is rich, but it is not mine

Our water is poisoned, poverty’s intense
We cry inequality, they just build a fence
We don’t even own the ditch where we’re dying
This world is rich, but it is not mine

This world is rich, but it is not right
We’re asking for help, before we run out of time
We can’t live on talk, we just need a hand
We’ll walk from the slums, to the promised land

This world is rich, but it is not mine

In America, we like to fantasize that everyone believes in democracy and in equality of opportunity. It’s not true. The battle lines here are the same as they have always been throughout the world. There are those that have that want the rest of us to believe that’s the natural order of things. Our poverty is either a sign of God’s disfavor or our own fault. Their wealth is a sign of God’s favor. This is the way the universe is ordered.

Joe Barton did us a favor by defending BP with his ridiculous apology. His subsequent retraction only amplified what he and many like him truly believe. We should take them at their word.

Related Articles:

• Tarballs and Tainted History
• Oil Spill and Flag…Worth a Thousand Words
• A Troubling Pattern in America’s Obama Story
• Evangeline, the Oil Spill and Highway 61
• A Requiem for the Gulf

Today was different. I don’t know if it was the change in geography, the fact that I’m a photographer now and people think that is cool or that I really REALLY care about my business compared to how I felt about the old rental wheels company, but today felt unlike any networking event I have attended.  Not only did I enjoy myself, but also I had several genuine interactions with people with whom I plan to keep in touch.  Do I know whether they will end up to be clients, friends or people that I can help out?  Who knows?  And actually, I don’t even care.  If someone wants to keep in touch, isn’t that, in and of itself, pretty valuable?  Aren’t genuine human connections enough?

During the conference, the Seattle Freeze was mentioned.  I don’t know if you are aware of this, but Seattle is known for being a city full of very polite people who are none-the-less difficult to get to know.  Yet, my experience here has been quite the opposite.  Maybe I’m just THAT cool, you know, that they overcome their natural frigid tendencies, but I don’t think so.  I think it is about your intentions and your approach.  Ever try to have an instant relationship with a young child you have just met?  In my eight years of experience as an elementary school teacher, I have found that it doesn’t work with many of them.  You seem like a scary clown trying too hard.  Have you tried smiling openly but letting them come to you?  Works every time!  Kids know who is receptive but safe because the body language says, “I will wait here until you are comfortable…no rush!  I’m not in a hurry but I want to know you better!”  But start with a nice open smile.  And MEAN it!  It doesn’t work if it is forced in any way.  When I smile kindly, I find that most people so willingly engage in a conversation about any topic, smile, connect, exchange information that I am regularly having to redefine how I feel about networking.  It is really no different than making friends.  In fact, that is all you are doing.  You are making friends with no obligation.  Would you want to make friends with someone that you knew would be hard selling you on the phone tomorrow?  Hell no.  That’s just awkward.  Don’t sell.  Just get to know.  Be helpful.  Send them little snippets and tips.  Don’t charge for it.  Wait for them to come to you.  If they never do, so what?  Doesn’t it feel good to help?

So today I chatted with a very nice lactose-intolerant urban planner who involved me in her quest for non-dairy creamer.  We gave each other big grins and thumbs up when she was finally able to drink her coffee.  That’s all.  I have her business card, she has mine but we didn’t try to sell each other and most importantly, we didn’t ignore each other because it is not yet apparent what we may offer each other, if anything beyond the shared enthusiasm for creamed coffee for all.  Later, I had a fascinating conversation with an Economic Development Specialist for the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development authority named Nic about the challenges of working in the his field in Chinatown.  He mentioned that the Wing Luke Museum relocation project was interesting because the original partners in the building to which the Museum would eventually relocate had passed down their share of the building to so many heirs that there were now many, many owners of the building.  The challenge they faced and overcame was to get all of those owners together and agree on a plan of action.  Later we discussed cameras and how he is planning to buy a DSLR and wanted some advice.  I wrote down some suggestions, along with some places to get good prices.  He offered to help me with some translations for a Chinese client of mine who has some ideas he needs expressed eloquently in English.  He gave me some invaluable information about how much of the language is based in analogy and history and that really understanding Chinese requires intense study of Chinese history.  I asked him if he felt like my business would be a good fit for shop owners in the International District and he felt that it would be.  I asked him specifically to keep me in mind if he comes across anyone who might need some product or event photography.  He said that he absolutely would and wanted to make sure we keep in touch.  This interaction went a bit further because we clicked and could already see where we might help each other out.  Again, no selling, just offers of mutual help.  I even offered to show him use his new camera.  Why?  Because he was enthusiastic about learning photography and I would enjoy teaching someone to learn to do something they will love.

Then Nic and I watched the panel talk about how Social Networking works best when you are giving.  About how social networking at its most effective is about a conversation you are having with your clients and potential customers.  A conversation.  I’ll say it again.  A conversation.  Not you talking about your business until they hide you or unfollow you.  A conversation.  About what matters to THEM.  And that conversation doesn’t always have to be about your business.  In fact, it shouldn’t be.  How can you have a real life, honest to goodness relationship with your clients?  Let’s say you sell baby shoes.  Can you also recommend a cool baby sock company?  Can you offer general parenting tips that will appeal to the types of parents who buy your baby shoes?  How about providing them with cool places to take their babies to have new experiences?  Sure, throw in some pictures of babies enjoying that experience in your shoes.  That’s fine, but don’t make a big deal out of it.  Just use some good photography to show that.  Let them see it.  That’s all you have to do.  Don’t draw a big arrow on the picture pointing to the shoes.  They’ll notice on their own.  When it comes down to the moment when they are going to get baby shoes, do you think they will take a look at your product line if they have found your posts and Tweets helpful?  If you offer your customers and prospects something they can use and like for free, will they get the idea that you care about them?  (Hint:  three letter affirmative) Do people tend to like people more that they know care about them? (Hint:  the answer is yes, according to scientific studies) Are your customers more willing to buy from you if they like you?  If you think no, well, shoot.   You are probably not all that likeable.  Sorry, but it is true.  It sometimes takes a likeable person to recognize the advantages that being likeable offers.  I’ll even pay a company or person I like a lot more money for the same product or service.  I like to support people I like, financially and otherwise.   Lots of people worry that Twitter and Facebook actually hinder human relationships and I suppose they can, if you use them to avoid the two-way conversation or use them to avoid face-to-face interaction.  In my personal experience, I have added at least ten people from the abstract, Tron-like world of Facebook to my real life meatspace.  These are people I clicked with online, developed a friendship with online, then met in real-life.  What follows are some examples of how my social networking relationships have blossomed beyond “friending.”  1) I connected with an artist on Facebook and after a few weeks we met for breakfast.  Ultimately we ended up being good friends who took little Colorado trips together throughout the summer before I moved to Seattle.  2) Another friend I met on Facebook, invited to a party and still talk to at least once per week.  3) I met another good friend here in Seattle on the Facebook wall of a guy who lived down the block from me in Colorado.   That was great because I had a friend here before I even moved to the area.   4) I  found a friend on LinkedIn and ended up hiring him as my business consultant.  5) Ultimately, the most important connection I have made on Facebook turns out to be the reason I moved to Seattle.  My high school boyfriend and I reconnected and after a year of dating long distance, decided to be together in the same city.  In other words, I have had some profound experiences in the real social world because of a conversation that was opened on a social network.  These are people with whom I would have lost contact with completely or never would have known in the first place without social networking.  The same goes for business.  My sister sells many of her little felted marvels through ww.fickleshop.com to people who heard about her through Facebook friends who “liked” her page or were specifically referred by their friends to her Facebook “like” page (Should we call them pages formerly known as fan pages?  No one knows how to describe those pages anymore.).  Some of these people start out as strangers but wind up being her real life friends, repeat customers and passionate brand zealots.  Others are family members or friends who, if not for Facebook, would have no idea what Amanda was up to and that she could immortalize their beloved  pet in the form of felt.  Friends of friends and long lost family/friends account for the majority of her business.

While networking 2.0 does include lots of social networking, even face-to-face networking is not about getting together to spew your elevator pitch these days.  In fact, it really never was.   Like web 2.0, it is about sharing, helping and making a genuine human connection with no concern for whether it turns into business later.  That’s almost caveman-like in its simplicity.  My apologies to those who have recently found out they have snippets of Neanderthal DNA code sitting in their cells (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1987568,00.html).  And yes, you share for free.  It is for the common good.  Think of these connections as open-source relationships:  transparent—not rigged with ulterior motives, friendly, helpful and focused on listening.  What do they need?  What can you offer?  Maybe nothing in that moment.  That’s okay.  But a week later, what if you are looking at a comment thread on a LinkedIn group later that reminds you of them?  Send them an email!  Include the info with no strings attached.  “Saw this and thought it could be a great way to get some national press for your business!”  What if you see an event that could help someone you know get new business?  Forward the information with a suggestion of why you thought of them when you saw it.  And don’t even bother to mention your business.  In fact, don’t even think about whether this connection will lead to business.  It doesn’t matter.  It is about being human, connecting with other humans and compassionately offering them something they may need.  Will it turn into business?  All I know is this:  when someone helps me out, I want to return the favor.  Many, MANY times, that means I help them with something they need for free.  Other times, it means I purchase from them with fierce loyalty, send others to their business and publicly praise their work.   So does it work?  Again.  It doesn’t matter.  Just do it with no expectations.  Period.  Just do it.  If that’s easy for you, GOOD!  You probably already get a lot out of networking OR are relieved to hear that you can just be your wonderful self and not try to sell anything.  The rest of you:  Stop thinking about where it will lead.  I said stop.  I’m going to slap you now.  Just kidding.  I’m here to help.

Related Articles:

• Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs—Your New Favorite Band
• Solstice in Seattle at the Fremont Solstice Parade!
• PostSecret: Do You Have a Secret?
• The San Antonio Missions
• My Facebook Secret

Evangeline, by George Rodrigue

I was 18, skinny, out of money and in New Orleans for the first time after some Appalachian adventures and a visit to Nixon’s D.C. I faked a cocky walk into a French Quarter piano bar and stayed until closing time when the brunette singer in a sequined costume gown took pity on me. We went to an all-night place to eat. She picked up the tab and sent me gently on my way, and I still don’t know who pays the angels.

I’d had a youthful tour of the Museum of America, from John Prine’s Paradise to Washington’s Marble Presidents, from the Encounter With the Compassionate Stranger to the Diorama of Violent Death. I drove on home to Houston, where everyone said I looked gaunt.

I’m spending a lot of time in New Orleans these days. The town, still recovering from the Storm, is bracing for the economic gut punch of the Spill. If I were Pharaoh of New Orleans, I’d let the people go before the Mississippi turns to blood and frogs fill the Superdome.

Already some LeBlancs and Toussaints have escaped to HBO, not the promised land but a virtual home for a spirited, impressionistic filmsong of New Orleans, Treme. Sandra Bullock’s moved to town and adopted a motherless child, and in the French Quarter a guy in a cop costume tosses you a Saints cap and asks for a twenty-dollar food-drive donation. Hat in hand, the role reversed, you give it up for an angel not forgotten.

In New Orleans, the boatmen and carpenters really do sing their varied carols, but it’s no Whitmanesque fantasy. Voices aged in pain and hope rise from the bottom of the Mississippi Delta that Paul Simon, in a song called “Graceland,” sees “shining like a national guitar.” The players are everywhere: on the streets, in the strip joints, in the dance halls, bars, courtyards and restaurants. They’re bowing fiddles, blowing horns and shouting songs as a nation once again turns its lonely eyes away.

Meanwhile, Evangeline’s Acadian descendents got to be praying that the British quit coming. In the very model of a modern ethnic cleansing (called, exquisitely, Le Grande Derangement) the Brits forcibly removed their ancestors from Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s.  Many settled in Louisiana, where, 250 years later, British Petroleum’s boiling the descendents in oil.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow turned the tragic Maritime folk-tale of lovers ripped apart by a cruel, colonialist empire into a book-length poem, Evangeline. Hugely popular in the late 19th Century, it was performed at county fairs, festivals and schools. But how do you make poetry from a million barrels of oil and a poisoned Gulf of Mexico?

Best to dream of Evangeline. Miriam Cooper, remembered for her role in Birth of a Nation, played Evangeline in a lost Raoul Walsh 1919 silent movie. The alluring Delores Del Rio took a turn as Evangeline in a 1929 film that features a theme song by Al Jolson and Billy Rose. And she’s the tragic heroine of Robbie Robertson and Emmylou Harris’s haunting song from The Last Waltz.

Evangeline’s long search for love and freedom in the land of exiles and immigrants might make her a more meaningful American symbol to stand in New York Harbor than what we’ve got there. And there’s already an Evangeline statue to work with, in St. Martinville, Louisiana, modeled after and donated by Delores Del Rio.

When I came to New York from New Orleans a couple of weeks ago,  I watched some immigrant Andean street musicians stand silent and curious before the Times Square pro-Palistinian protest of the Israeli attack on a ship carrying humanitarian aide to Gaza. Everywhere it’s another Grande Derangement, maybe the Grande Grande Derangement. We need a symbol for exiles and refugees, but I don’t know where to tell them to put it. Maybe Dylan does:

Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose
Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down on Highway 61

Can you think of a better place to make a stand with Evangeline against our global Le Grande Derangement? They’ve cut the throat of the Gulf of Mexico, and it’ll be hell to pay. As Levon Helm and Emmylou sing:

High on the top of Hickory Hill
Standing in the lightning and thunder
Down on the river, the boat was a-sinking
She watched that Queen go under.

Related Articles:

• Sisyphus Happy
• Hey Great Britain, It’s About Lives, Not Politics
• Fatal Fantasies of Our Technological Omnipotence
• And, On Piano, Dick Nixon: Music and Anarchy
• Untamable Melodies: Music’s Revolutionary Spirit