the punishment of ayiti

Begin watching at minute 9:50 for Randall Robinson's discussion with Charlie Rose, on the continual occupation of Haiti and the United States' sympathy for the rich, and punishment of the poor.

i've only just begun

As a child, I was never scared by gory movies or by thoughts of monsters under my bed. This surprises me in retrospect because my parents never paid much attention to what I was watching on TV. In fact, now that I think about it, they encouraged me to watch things that were too sophisticated for my level of maturity. Perhaps they did this with hopes that I would develop a vocabulary and sensibility able to overcome typical childhood fears, thus, their child might require less parenting. Maybe I bored them, and they wanted more things to talk with me about. With my parents’ stamp of approval, I recall watching things like Mississippi Burning, the Golden Girls, and episodes from the Victory at Sea series all before the age of 11. This culminated into an all out private demise when on January 1, 1989, I watched The Karen Carpenter Story, a made for TV movie.

Karen Carpenter would haunt me for years.

Karen Carpenter was the famous female drummer from the group “The Carpenters.” Richard Carpenter, her controlling older brother, was the other half of the duo. (Ultimately, I place blame for Karen’s death on Richard’s quaalude addiction and his jealousy about Karen’s marriage.) The movie opened with a scene I will never forget. Karen has collapsed at home, and she is being wheeled in a hospital bed through a very bright hallway. The ghost of “alive and well Karen” - - the Karen before the fame - - is roller skating alongside the hospital bed, with pigtails in, singing. She occasionally looks at the camera and smiles a creepy smile that as an 11 year old, I never wanted to receive from a stranger.

This woman systematically starved herself to death to defy her family and her fame. I had never been exposed to something to scary. I became equally obsessed about and afraid of, Karen Carpenter. Thank God there was no internet at the time, but nonetheless I managed to find photos of her at the public library. “Ok Dad, I will be up in the children’s section.” Yea right. I was in the biography and music sections flagging books for photocopying. Her narrow, pale face contrasting the long dark hair: scared the shit out of me, but I also couldn’t get enough. I recall finding The Carpenters’ tapes, “Close to You” and “A Kind of Hush” in my Grandmother’s basement. I asked to borrow them. I brought them home with me. I played them, very quietly in my bedroom, with my ear next to the speaker, startled by just about any other noise. I can still hear the build up of the whistle in “Close to You.” It was terrifying. The next day I left those tapes on the school bus. Those tapes needed to be someone else’s problem.

This kind of thing went on for a long time.

It really was debilitating, to think about Karen Carpenter all the time. I don’t know if my parents were keyed-in, but my girlfriends knew about my obsessive/fearful relationship with Karen Carpenter. A year or two later, when I started to let go a bit of this issue, I recall being at a sleep-over at Lindsay Waterman’s house. All of my best girlfriends were there in the basement, laughing and having fun. I was trying to open a door that was jammed, to get into another part of the basement. Seizing the opportunity to get my goose, Mary Waldorf, my best friend started screaming, “Ahh!! Katie! The door won’t open because Karen Carpenter is holding on to the other side!!!” As I flew off the door and leaped on to my sleeping bag for comfort, I reciprocated screaming blood-curdling screams!

I instituted some cognitive therapy for myself and things became easier. I just didn’t seek out the information about Karen Carpenter anymore. I stopped looking for things to see and learn about her.

I starved myself of her.

Since then, once in a blue moon, someone will make a reference to her in a movie, or I will see something about her on TV. I usually do ok.

Usually. . .

Earlier this month, after many weeks of graduate school stress, I went out to celebrate the end of the semester with my friend and classmate, Jewly. She is a journalist and has also worked in the music industry for many years. Her own album, Darlin Understand will be released on January 29. Over pino grigio and vegetarian shepherd’s pie, with a bluesy voice gargling in the background, Jewly and I covered all the things women talk about over dinner: relationships, work, and the future. While talking about her debut album, she shared a funny story about the history of her drum set. Things started to get fuzzy for me. I looked at her thin and delicate facial features. I heard the words “drum set” over in my head and I kinda just went blank. Her lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear. Her head was thrown back in laughter a little bit, here and there. But the soft whistle of “Close to You” was winding up in my brain. Grasping what was going on here, I interrupted her story and I quickly asked, “So you play the drums? You’re, you are a female drummer?” She noticed that I was upset, and replied with a cautious, “yeeess?”

I said sort of in a defeated but accusatory manner, “Oh. So. You probably like Karen Carpenter, huh? You know, she was a female drummer too?” Not allowing time for a response, I continued in a riled up mode like John Cusack in High Fidelity. “Well Jewly, she scared the shit out of me! She scared the shit out of me. And that made-for-TV movie, The Karen Carpenter Story? That comes in as a close second to the worst thing about my childhood.” Jewly looked confused. She laughed nervously. Realizing what sort of an outburst I had just had, I excused myself to the bathroom. It was an all out relapse. And I realized that Jewly being a new friend, could very well have chosen to bail on her creepy new friend Kate, upon my return from the bathroom. But she was still at the table. I apologized and told her the story. I even told her about leaving the tapes on the bus. It helped to talk about it.

anastasis

(skip to minute 4:00)

where is baby jesus?

We must not seek the child Jesus
in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs.
We must seek him among the undernourished children
who have gone to bed at night with nothing to eat,
among the poor newsboys
who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways.
Archbishop Oscar Romero, December 24, 1979

don't let this happen to you

my letter to michael moore

Dear Michael Moore:

According to your recent movie Sicko, you gifted $12,000 to an individual managing an anti-Michael Moore website. Before you read this letter, please make note that my Bank of America account accepts automatic transfers through the convenience of just a few clicks on the internet.

Like other modern-day prophets stuck between a rock and a hard place, you probably thought that you were being witty (or at least ironic) in your latest movie. Putting a bunch of Americans on a boat en route to Guantanamo Bay in search of uber efficient health care is an example of your poignant use of wit and irony. You probably thought that placing high-ranking US military officials testifying that health care at Guantanamo is superb, in tension with the inability of Americans to obtain adequate and affordable health care in places like Michigan- was witty and ironic. Mr. Moore, I regret to inform you that you were neither witty nor ironic but rather merely irresponsible and obnoxious. Sicko denies the hell in which Guantanamo detainees have lived and not only the “Al Qada suspects” for the past six years under the Bush regime but also that of the Haitians wrongfully imprisoned there during the Clinton Administration. Despite your possible intentions of wit and irony, your intentional denial of the torture, humiliation, and strife those (often wrongfully kidnapped) prisoners have undergone during the past six years is actively dehumanizing.

I appreciate the first half of your film because you provide an accessible and veracious arrangement of pericopes which depict the personal stories of Americans struggling against the US health care system. I appreciate that you pointed out the lunacy that the work of mailing a letter across town is more of a federalized act and is therefore of higher priority to our government than the work of saving the lives of children running high fevers. I appreciate your knack for revealing the interconnectedness of so many things such as the necessity of a living wage, the disaster in Iraq, the inequities of race and gender - with health care accessibility.

It is just so disappointing that you didn’t bother to do that in your portrayal of medicine in Cuba because it would’ve made your point much more palatable, accurate, and fierce.

You cowardly let the United States off the hook with respect to what our country has done to the Cuban quality of life via our government’s canceling of aid/sanctions/embargo echoing the damage the fall of the Iron Curtain has caused them. For the past twenty years or so, the quality of life in Cuba has rapidly deteriorated. Cuba is a country with a collective memory of slavery. You also deny this in your depiction of life there, and that silence is a sin. Your film suggests that if it is easy and cheap to get an inhaler in Cuba, than life must be good there. * Ok, I will go ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt, and say that you might be trying to make the point here that despite how disparagingly difficult it is to obtain the means for the day in Cuba,- medical care remains a priority. Fine.

But, the true gem you missed for support of your argument about Cuba is the tale of Cuban doctors and the free medical school program there. Cuba provides free medical school. All doctors trained in Cuba are then required to spend two years in a developing country working with the poor. Cuba has more doctors working world-wide than the United Nations’ World Health Organization. A Haitian friend of mine participated in this program and returned to run a clinic in Haiti in a small, rural town were folks used to just go to the grave, not to the doctor. There, within two weeks of his arrival he personally had 27 HIV/AIDS patients under his direct care. The Cuban doctors in Haiti and elsewhere are not spreading “communist political propaganda,” (but in the memory & honor of the strife of the people of Cuba), rather, they serve the least of these of these, across the world.

Why didn’t you talk about this, or any other redeeming aspect of the Cuban medical system? Why did you find it necessary to ignore every aspect of life in Cuba or at Guantanamo, outside of access to an inhaler?

As an aspiring anthropologist it will be my job to tell the story of a thing. Adam Smith believed that if you dealt with a thing for long enough and explored it long enough you could reveal all of its history. You’re not very good at that sort of endeavor, so I think you should stop calling your films “documentaries” and consider a genre more akin to the swift boat movement.

I also accept checks to my mailbox at Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School.

With warm regards.

nashville in harmony

My friend Susan has a bumper sticker on her car that says "I'm straight. I'm married. I support gay rights." She is a member of Nashville in Harmony. Nashville in Harmony is a choir addressing GLBT-ITT issues in the community, (www.nashvilleinharmony.org).

Tonight I attended their concert at Blair, at Vanderbilt. I sat with my friend Kara from school. When they sang the Charlie Brown Christmas song I told Kara that I was about to cry! I recall watching it with Gracie, years ago. And just then a mobile Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree traveled across the front of the stage, and my nostalgia was comforted by laughter.

My roots are a mix of New York, Washington-DC, and California, and despite my bizarre experiences of travel in Montana and abroad, moving to Nashville was a surprise to me for numerous reasons. I was primarily, (and continue to be), shocked by the silenced voices of so many, here. People who are from here seem to notice this but accept this better than I do. One silenced voice is that of the gay community, - a very suppressed voice in the south.

Nashville in Harmony is a place for these voices. And the voices are amazing!! Nashville in Harmony shows that there are many ways to use one's voice.

Here is one of the songs they sang tonight:

sam under the tree

During a small group discussion in class tonight, Fred was talking about the values of our class and how in some ways our class experience embraces the principals of Bob Moses in community organizing theory and praxis during the civil rights movement, specifically a lifting up of the importance of personal connections. While I am both convinced of and moved by the intimate exchanges and encounters in class, I challenged Fred’s claim. I told the group that I have an imagination about what their lives are like on a daily basis. I said that I listen to and think on the information about their lives that they graciously share with me, but really I can’t know what it is like to live at Riverbend. I mentioned what I wrote in my post yesterday about comfort, and also of how my faith is weaker than theirs for a variety of reasons, one reason being that I am allowed to comfort myself with all sorts of things in order to survive the day. Sam (a calm and centered man around my father’s age, with whom I have been in regular conversation since August), piped right up, saying with a very excited look on his face, “you mean like take a bath?” This really caught me off guard. He knew right away what he wanted to do for comfort.

Sitting with Sam after class, I asked him if he wanted to take a bath when he gets out of prison. He said, “I am going to. It is going to be one of the first things I do.” I asked Sam what else he would like to do. He calmly said to me: It’s the little things that you don’t realize you can do until you aren’t able to do them any longer. Like sitting on the porch after dark. I’m gonna do that too. Or walking down to the store to buy a pint of ice cream. Any flavor. Here we get ice cream about once ever couple of months, and it’s just a tiny scoop thing of vanilla. Before they moved me out here to Riverbend, I went ten years without seeing a tree. Here, they have two trees. People must have thought I was crazy, but when I got here, I walked right up to that tree and I just stared at it. And I touched it. I hadn’t been able to see a tree is so long, and sitting under trees was something I used to do a lot. I’m going to do that again too, when I leave here.

I told Sam about the time when I was in Haiti and I was really sick, all I could think of were baby carrots. I told him that I was lying under my mosquito net feeling stuck, hungry, and sick just dreaming about baby carrots. I told him that I had numerous fantasies about eating the carrots. I had running visualizations about going to buy the carrots and about how I would eat them, and about how I would surprise myself by remembering later that I had left over carrots in the fridge. Sam said that’s like his life.

I want to treat Sam as if the change has already happened, so to impact his visions and hope in a positive way. As I drink my glass of wine, in my comfy pajamas, surrounded by books about all the things I love, I’ve decided to start thinking of Sam as that guy over there, under the tree, with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in his hand, hearing the faint sound of running bath water.

prayer request

This morning at Hobson Methodist Church in East Nashville, the pastor reminded us of how very difficult it is to pray for others when we don't know anything about them, and when we don't feel we have anything in common with their pain.

I ask that you remember yourself at your loneliest. The moment when you knew that no one was in your corner. I know it is painful, but remember that saddest time when you put yourself to bed thinking, "I've got nothing and no one."

Now imagine that moment, and imagine being in prison. It's not what Paris Hilton went through.

Every Monday evening, I visit the Riverbend Maximum Security Institute, where Tennessee's most dangerous, (personally, I would say most harmed by market scarcity and a former slave society), convicted criminals are housed and executed. I've been taking a class there since August and intend on auditing future classes. Most of these guys have killed people. Some have been in for 30+ years and will never see the free world. Others have been in for a long time, but hope to get out in three to five years. A few of them still have at least twenty years to go.

From my friends living on the "inside" I have learned about two things: 1) reconciliation, and 2) patience. Paul Tillich said, "Waiting is its own special destiny. Every time is a time of waiting, waiting for the breaking in of eternity. All time, both history and personal life is expectation."

This semester I have agonized - - feeling that I have very little to offer these guys. But in moments of reflection, I know that I can in fact pray intensely on their behalf, and now I ask that you pray for them too during this month. Ask your churches to pray for the imprisoned. Do it at the dinner table. Pray for their comfort. You know, Christmas time can be the loneliest of all times even while being surrounded by Aunts and Uncles in tacky sweaters and eating cookies. Christmas time is when suicide rates peak. It is when our non-Christian friends feel a peculiar sense of cultural and socio-alienation or disconnect. It is when we long for that which we have given up. It is when we drink too much red wine. It is when we think about how things should be.

Please pray for the comfort and justice of the imprisoned during this time. When class ends and I walk in one direction and these guys walk in the other, I am reminded of all the silly things I am allowed to comfort myself with simply because I live in the free world. My friends need the prayers of those who are also broken and suffering: that's you and me.