The Yard Sale of Ideas

I like to think I’m a fairly easy-going sort.  I get along with most people who cross my path and I’m able to fulfill most of life’s responsibilities without too much grumbling, but there are things that drive me crazy. 

Yard sales (aka “garage sales”, “tag sales” or “rummage sales”) fit that category.  I can’t think of anything worse than spending a perfectly good day pawing through piles of stuff that other people have judged not worth keeping.  I’d much rather be reading or writing, spending a day at the beach or even cleaning my house. 

People with growing children and limited incomes, inveterate readers, quilters and crafters, Ebay re-sellers or folks with a passion for the act of buying have a different perspective, I’m sure.  But I’m not a shopper, and I’m trying to simplify.  In my life, yard sales don’t help meet real needs.  They provide little more than a few hours of distraction and a pile of purchases which need to be hauled home, hidden away and then handed over to the next neighbor who decides to hold a yard sale.

All Dressed Up with Somewhere to Go

 

On October 23, 1956, I celebrated my tenth birthday.  There was cake, ice cream and a small party with balloons and crepe paper streamers.  On that same day, in a world utterly removed from my cozy Iowa neighborhood, other children watched as friends, parents and neighbors celebrated an occasion first known as the Hungarian Uprising and later as the Hungarian Revolution.

As I headed toward our kitchen for my post-birthday breakfast on October 24, or perhaps the 25th, the Des Moines Register was lying in its accustomed place on the dining room table where my father always laid it before going upstairs to shave. A huge photograph filled the space above the fold, with the words REVOLUTION IN HUNGARY splashed across the top.  

At that point in my life I never had met a Hungarian and had little idea what a revolution might entail.  But I could read, and I liked to look at photographs. Curious to see what required such large print and such a big picture, I paused to look at the paper, only to have  my mind wiped as clean of thought as our classroom blackboards at day’s end. Gripped by a strange, vertiginous feeling, I realized I was holding my breath as my first, visceral understanding of a world far larger than my own and far less pleasant began to envelop me.

With God on Our Side, Redux

 

This election night, as I watched MSNBC’s television coverage, followed a few liberals around battleground states on Twitter and read through an assortment of conservative blogs, I began to experience the equivalent of political vertigo.

As the evening progressed, two very different views of Barack Obama’s election began to emerge from the dizzying swirl of images.  One focused on the historic moment, not only celebrating a partisan victory and the election of our nation’s first Black President, but also reflecting on the journey of a nation that once accepted slavery as the norm.  In the opinion of others, Obama’s election betokened the erosion of traditional American values, the economic collapse of the United States, and perhaps the fall of Western Civilization itself at the hands of a nattily-dressed and smooth talking anti-Christ.

Several phrases I encountered last night distressed me.  One was that America is “getting what we deserve”.  It was meant to be a perjorative statement, implying that a misguided, stubborn, and possibly evil nation is being punished by God for our misdeeds and thoughts.  Quite apart from the question of whether God would punish an entire nation of Jobs for the political sins of a few, there’s a certain humor in the thought of Barack Obama as God’s chosen agent of destruction.  

But not everyone is amused.   Some express their frustration with the enormity of our problems and the rapidity of the changes overtaking our nation by saying, “This is not the America I grew up in”.   And they’re right.  It isn’t.  But our parents said the same thing, and their parents before them.  Society isn’t a museum but a living organism, constantly changing in response to the forces that ebb and flow around it.  Romanticizing the past is tempting, but re-creating the past is impossible.  Life moves forward, not back, and our destination is the future.

Caring and Thinking: Two Men, Two Styles, One Goal

 

When William F. Buckley, Jr. died this year on February 27, I was touched by the on-air tribute given him by Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball.  I don’t always agree with Mr. Matthews, and I don’t always appreciate his style, but on that particular evening, he said something important. 

What struck me was not what Matthews said about William Buckley – his writing, his publications, his sailing, his extraordinarily privileged life – but what he said about himself.  As Matthews put it,  “To start out as a young conservative is not–let’s look at the facts–to end up there. But you have to start somewhere. You have to care before you can think, think before you can change your mind…   I owe that start to the man who died today at his desk…”

Those words came again to mind when I heard Tim Russert had died.  Like Buckley, Russert was a caring and thoughtful man, an extraordinary interviewer, and a bridge between worlds.  While Russert made the world of “inside the Beltway” politics more accessible to ordinary Americans, Buckley brought intellect and wit to  television and helped make erudite conversation the newest parlor game in town.  When I listed “good conversation” as my favorite sport on my Wordpress “About Me” page, it’s at least in part a testament to the influence of Buckley’s Firing Line in my life.  On the other hand, when I settle in with a cup of coffee and a printed newspaper or one of the blogs I follow, it’s partly because of a passion for political process that Tim Russert helped engender.

Certainly there were differences between the men: in background, temperament and style. 

The aristocratic and patrician Buckley could be - and often was - insufferable, pompous, or unutterably obnoxious.  He just as often was brilliant, despite his acerbic tongue and impenetrable vocabulary.  Buckley was all privilege, old money, and connections forged over generations.  Born in New York, he lived in Mexico and Connecticut before beginning first grade in Paris and being further schooled in London.  An accomplished harpsichordist who wanted Bach played at his funeral, he attended Yale and graduated into a life that became the stuff of legends. 

Tim Russert, on the other hand, was working class Buffalo, a ”just-folks” sort of fellow full of homespun wisdom, compassion and a kindness toward others – even perfect strangers – that was legendary.  As E.J. Dione of the Brookings Institute put it, “Tim Russert knew it was as easy to be kind as to be cruel.”  No harpsichordist, he: it was The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, who played Thunder Road at his memorial service.  Not given to the linguistic flourishes of a Buckley, he was intelligent and insightful, if just a bit uncertain of himself in the beginning.  When he first came to work for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Moynihan recognized his insecurity and gave him a classic piece of advice, saying, “What they know you can learn.  What you know, they never can learn.”

 As these things happen, each man became associated with his own remarkable television phenomenon.

Buckley’s Firing Line was must-see tv for years. After he died, Eric Konigsberg, writing in the February 29 New York Times rehearsed a bit of the history of the show, an hour-long PBS production.   Over the years guests included Louis S. Auchincloss, Alistair Cooke, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and William Simon.  Politicians weren’t the only ones who showed up.  Malcolm Muggeridge was there, as was Mortimer Adler and Jorge Luis Borges, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg. 

During Allen Ginsberg‘s appearance, the poet asked Mr. Buckley’s permission to sing a song in praise of Lord Krishna.  According to Richard Brookhiser, quoted by Konigsberg, “Bill was very gentle with him.  He said, ‘Of course’…  Mr. Ginsberg proceeded to play a long and doleful number on a harmonium, chanting along slowly and passionately,  And when he was finished, Bill said, ‘Well, that’s the most unharried Krishna I’ve ever heard.’ ”

That is pure Buckley, but Russert had his own, equally enjoyable style.  Until Eugene Robinson pointed it out, I hadn’t been aware of some Meet the Press  traditions.  “After each segment, a photographer comes out to take a picture for the archives.  When the taping is done, snacks are brought to the set and the guests linger for a while, chatting with the host about their families, about baseball, about the news of the day and about what’s likely to be the news of tomorrow.  It’s all so civilized that it feels almost anachronistic.”

In this photograph from Meet the Press archives, Senator Christopher Dodd, D-Connecticut, cavorts with Russert, his wife Jackie Clegg and their daughters, Christina and Grace. after a taping at the NBC Washington studios on Sunday, Oct. 28, 2007 (AP Photo/Meet the Press, Alex Wong).  There were many reasons newsmakers fought to be on Meet the Press, and while post-grilling socializing wasn’t at the top of the list, it surely played a role in the overall appeal of working with Russert.

It can be tempting to see Buckley and Russert as different ends of the thinking-and-caring scale, with Buckley the thinker and Russert the one who cared, but that simply isn’t so. Both men gave profound thought to the issues of the day and both cared deeply – not only about the issues, but about their life’s work and the people around them. 

Equally important was their passionate care and concern for what they understood to be their responsibility to the nature and development of civility in public discourse.  Whether writing, interviewing, or speaking, whether engaging the public by the persuasiveness of their ideas or sheer force of personality, both men brought passion, intellect and good humor to their love of truth and politics.

Given their dedication and passion, it seems perfectly fitting that both men died at their work.  William Buckley was writing at his desk.  Tim Russert was in a studio at NBC’s Washington News Bureau recording a voice-over.  Men of faith schooled in Jesuit traditions,  both understood the meaning of laborare est orare - to work is to pray – and both left this life wrapped in the mantle of that prayer.  

As I think about these two lives lost in one year, and about their contributions to our public life, I cannot help but ponder the need to maintain balance between caring and thinking.  Thought without care risks becoming judgmental.  Caring without the discipline of thought easily becomes sentimentality.  Finding the appropriate balance between the two is one of our most important tasks.

Though never granted opportunity to know these two remarkable men personally, I value their lives and work, and refuse to choose one over the other.  Like thinking and caring, they seem to belong together – two visions and two voices born of two different worlds which share a single goal: an engaged and informed populace willing to forego platitudes and easy answers in favor of discernment and commitment to difficult decisions.

Whatever their differences, the words of Bessie Anderson Stanley surely apply to both:

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of Earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.

 

 

 

 

 

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If Yoani Sanchez Read Your Blog

 

 Wednesday night in Havana, Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez read her speech accepting this year’s Ortega y Gasset prize for digital journalism to friends gathered in her apartment.  She was prevented from traveling to Spain to accept the prize in person by a regime which appears increasingly distressed by the attention shown the young blogger.  An interview aired on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition provides an update and a bit of context for those not familiar with her work.

I have been following the story of Yoani Sanchez for some time.  When I first wrote the following essay, one of my greatest concerns was the translation of her words.  I do not read or speak Spanish, and the response she posted in March, just after Cuban authorities began slowing access to her blog, appeared on the internet in a variety of forms.

Now, I have a translation which I feel comfortable posting.  Provided by Jose Ma Gonzalez, a native of Spain, and Jane Reinhart-Gonzalez, I am confident it gives a good sense of Ms. Sanchez’ style as well as an accurate reflection of her words.  Many thanks to Jose and Janie, who do translation work professionally in Galveston, Texas.

Some of you who stop by will have read this before.  Nevertheless, considering the latest developments in Ms. Sanchez’ life, it is worth another read, and certainly worth posting for those who do not know the story of this year’s winner of the Ortega y Gasset prize.

Yoani Sanchez haunts my life.  Slender, dark-haired, she walks Havana streets thinking of toasters and lemons, passing into and through the shadows of the Castros, fingers curled around the flash drive hidden in her pocket.  She is walking to a liason, a tryst, an encounter hidden from the eyes of the world.  Her desire is not for a man, but for a computer monitor: her longing and hunger, to send her words out into the world.

Yoani Sanchez is a young Cuban woman who blogs from Havana.  She blogs rather well, with a worldwide readership.  The circumstances of her life, combined with her words and her incisive intelligence, make her someone worth reading.  They also make her someone to fear, particularly if you are a Cuban official whose only longing and intention is to maintain order and preserve the status quo.  Dictatorships will smile benignly on philosophers and thinkers who fuss about grand issues like freedom, censorship and ineffective government using large, rectangular words.  But when pretty young bloggers begin to describe the realities of life in words everyone can understand – toasters and oxen and lemons and milk – dictatorships pay attention.

I first attended to Yoani Sanchez when I saw her name – and nothing more – posted on a website.  Curious, I began to search.  I found an article about her blog in the December 22, 2007 Wall Street Journal, and was moved by the simple description of what she does:

 ”On a recent morning, Yoani Sanchez took a deep breath and gathered her nerve for an undercover mission: posting an Internet chronicle about life in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.”

“To get around Cuba’s restrictions on Web access, the waif-like 32-year-old posed as a tourist to slip into an Internet cafe in one of the city’s luxury hotels, which normally bar Cubans.  Dressed in gray surf shorts, T-shirt and lime-green espadrilles, she strode toward a guard at the hotel’s threshold and flashed a wide smile.  The guard, a towering man with a shaved head, stepped aside.  ‘I think I’m able to do this because I look so harmless,’ says Ms. Sanchez, who says she is sometimes mistaken for a teenager.  Once inside the cafe, she attached a flash memory drive to the hotel computer and, in quick, intense movements, uploaded her material.”

Equally skilled at balancing action with reflection, Ms. Sanchez’ own words about her extraordinary routine are modest.  “The sensation of losing fear, of risking, is a sensation that is normally irreversible.  After you cross certain lines, there is no way back.”  After a lifetime of internalizing the constraints of life in a dictatorship, she describes her blog as a way to escape her “internal policeman”, a way “to push the limits, to find the line where the internal limits end and the real limits begin.”  Sometimes, Sanchez suggests, even a child’s game of “let’s pretend” can be useful.  “You have to believe that you are free and try to act like it,” she says.  “Little by little, acting as though you are free can be contagious.”

Reading her words and tracing the contours of her life, I found them remarkable, if somewhat removed from my own.  The single point of intersection between us seemed to be our blogs.  Produced in quite different circumstances, for different audiences and to significantly different purposes, they are identical as expressions of a writer’s passion: to have words read, appreciated, and absorbed as agents of transformation and change.  However, the initial differences in format I found between Ms. Sanchez’ blogs and my own are instructive.

Like most Cuban bloggers, I had chosen to remain anonymous.  Whether grounded in caution, fear, or simple preference, anonymity can provide comfort, a sense of privacy and security.  It also makes issues of honesty and accountability less relevant.  Ms. Sanchez, who signs her name and posts her photo on her Web site, appears to have few problems with honesty and accountability; she is quite willing to express her opinions and defend them publicly from the very heart of a dictatorship.  Such forthrightness earns her a prerogative or two.  Yoani Sanchez, 32 years old and living 90 miles off our shores in a crumbling nation which would prefer not to be portrayed in such detail, has every right to turn to a 61-yuear-old, comfortable and completely un-oppressed woman and inquire, “And you.  Where is your picture?  what is your name?  Tell me your convictions.”

As I removed my avatar and replaced it with a photograph, as I began signing my name to my work and pondered the implications of doing so, it was the challenge of Yoani Sanchez’ words which resonated in my mind: “Once you experience the flavor of saying what you think, of publishing it and signing it with your name, well, there’s no turning back.  One of the first things we have to do, a great way to begin to change, is to be more honest about saying what you think.”

Ms. Sanchez has a history of saying what she thinks.  Admitted to the University of Havana for study of philology – the study of language and literature – she nurtured a love for Latin American writers.  But her thesis topic, Dictatorships in Latin American Literature, brought her academic career to an end.  “The thesis wasn’t overly critical,” Sanchez says, “but the mere act of defining what a dictatorship is in an academic paper made people really nervous, because the definition was a portrait of Cuba.”

Forced to move from academia to the public forums of the Internet, she unnerved the regime even more: not by overtly political criticisms or attacks on the Castro brothers themselvs, but by her vivid descriptions of daily life.  On March 24, 2008 Cuban authorities became nervous enough to take action, blocking or slowing access to Sanchez’ blog.  According to Sanchez, government censors placed filters that delayed viewing of her Web page on a server in Germany.  Her response, offered here in translation, has been described as classic Sanchez:

I recognize that I have been misbehaving.  I rebel against orders; I look for lemons that never appear; I demand excuses that never arrive; and – a great absurdity of mine – I put my opinions in a blog, with photo and name included.

As you can see, bcause of these thirty-two impertinent years, I am not being corrected.  As a result, the anonymous censors of our ravenous cyberspace have wanted to enclose me in the room, turn off the light and not let my friends enter inside.  That, translated to the language of the Internet, means to block my site, to filter my Web page; in short, to puncture the Blog so that my compatriots cannot read it.

Ever since a few days ago, “Generacio Y” is merely an error message on the screen of many Cuban computers – another site blocked for the “monitored” Internet users of the Island.  My words, my text, and that of other bloggers and digital journalists, have caused the presser foot of the inquisitors to do its ridiculous part.  We have received a slap on the face, the “severe wink” and an admonishment from these arrogant and rebellious adolescents.  Nevertheless, the reprimand is so useless and pointless that it is an embarrassment, and so easy to outmaneuver that it turns into an incentive.

“This breath of fresh air has disheveled the hair of bureaucrats and censors,” she said in a later telephone interview, vowing to continue her blog.  “Anyone with a bit of computer skills knows how to get around them.  The aim of government censors is to block readership in Cuba, where people have limited access to Internet.  They are admitting that no alternative way of thinking can exist in Cuba, but people will continue reading us somehow.  There is no censorship that can stop people who are determined to access the internet.”

Another bit of fresh air blew through Cuba and the worldwide blogging community on Friday, April 4.  On that day, Sanchez’ creativity and persistence was rewrded when her Generacion Y  blog received one of Spain’s top journalism awards, the Ortega y Gasset prize for digital journalism.  The Spanish newspaper El Pais, which awards the prize annually, said Sanchez won it for her “shrewdness” in overcoming hurdles to freedom of expression in Cuba, her “vivacious” style and her drive to join the “global space of citizen journalism”.

Speaking with the Reuters News Service by telephone from her home in Havana, Ms. Sanchez said, “This is great encouragement for Cuban bloggers, who are still at an embryonic stage.  It recognizes that Cuban blogs can be a parallel source of information, reflection and opinions independent from Cuba’s official media.”

 It does much more than that.  Winning a significant prize in a first-world country gets you dinner, a check, an NPR interview and a swing around the talk-show circuit.  In third world dictatorships, winning an international prize can help save your life, as the additional attention and scrutiny set up a useful barrier between the writer and those who would silence a voice.

In a recent blog, I touched briefly on the moral and ethical dimensions of art.  Regardless of the medium, decisions are made by artists at every turn.  Am I working for myself alone, or am I willing to consider the world in which I live?  Am I willing to accept responsiblity for my creation, or will I refuse to engage criticism or disagreement?  To the extent that my art touches other lives, what effect do I wish to have?

The same questions of morality and ethics arise in blogging.  It is easy for us to forget that decisions are being made on a daily basis because the process itself is so easy.  You make coffee, you turn on the computer, you begin to type.  It is even easier to abdicate personal responsibility.  Challenged or rebuffed, facing disagreement or simple misunderstanding, we can choose to turn off our computers and walk away, leaving a trail of words, photos, videos, cartoon and .gifs in our wake without consequence.  Alone in front of our monitors, we are free to consider only those who choose to make their presence known to us, or we can imagine with sympathy and attentive curiosity the faceless ones who also read our words.

The simple fact is that we need to stop, and think about what we are doing.  I do not mean to argue here for one kind of blogging over another; this is not a criticism of cartoons, videos or smiley faces.  It is not meant to be dismissive of casual or shallow posting and, above all, it certainly is not a rejection of hanging out and having fun on the Internet.  All those things have their place.  But, when I think of Yoani Sanchez, their place is quite beside the point.

The point is this.  Imagine Yoani Sanchez, leaving her house on a delicious May afternoon with lime-green espadrilles on her feet, a flash drive in her pocket and a map to the nearest internet connection in her head.  Imagine her languid smile as she slips past the guard, her studied casualness as she sits at a rented computer and draws her treasure from her pocket.  Imagine her relief as the latest set of entries uploads properly, fleeing to the safety of German servers.  Imagine, then, Yoani Sanchez with an additional ten minutes of allotted time, deciding to indulge herself in the luxury of a quick surf across the Net.  With a click of the keys, in a sudden, unbelievable instance of serendipity, she arrives at your page, and begins to read.

What would Yoani Sanchez think?

 

 

 © Text copyright Linda Leinen 2008

COMMENTS are welcome.  To read previous comments or post one of your own, please click on the tiny “Comments” link below.  Eventually, I’ll learn CSS and revise the template, but this note will have to do for the time being!