On my flight home from Morocco, the long leg, Casablanca to Montreal, I had a bulkhead seat and 370 movies to choose from. Bridget Jones’s Baby, Alien, Batman Returns, Back to the Future II and III, A Bug’s Life, Forrest Gump, Glory, Million Dollar Baby, The Green Mile, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery; they were all there, just waiting for me to point and press.
It’s a seven-hour flight and I read my novel as long as I could stand it and then I scrolled the movies. Besides the movies, there were 650 “shows;” that’s over 1000 ways of piloting yourself through the airplane noise and stink, your sore butt and cramped legs, and the silent wrestling match with the person in the seat beside you over armrest justice. I’d smile and brace my elbow when I passed him his coffee or his chicken taco and he’d smirk back, pressing my arm for advantage while I was off balance.
The movie Casablanca was an option; it’s my favorite movie. My favorite scene takes place in Rick’s Café: Yvonne, a young French woman with her heart beating for Rick, proprietor and our American hero, waltzes into the scene and allows German Soldiers to buy her drinks to court his jealousy. A German soldier sits at the piano and bangs the keys while his fellow countrymen, led by Major Strasse (the perfect evilist), thump the piano with their clenched fists and sing Die Wacht am Rhein. In response, hero and idealist, Victor stands in front of the band and commands they play La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. The scene becomes a North Africa battlefront, the Germans in their synchronized male voices and well-cut uniforms arrayed in a tight battle group against the trombone, trumpet, drums and guitar, the many mouths open wide in shared song, the suits and long dresses, the white police uniforms, led by the idealist in his white tuxedo, overwhelm the Germans in beauty, numbers, volume and passion. As the tears run down Yvonne’s cheeks, they run down mine. Viva la France!
The problem with Casablanca is that it is a celebration of a war-besieged 1942 America and was shot when the outcome was unclear. The main character, Rick, outcast and rejected lover, damaged but tough, represents an America of ideals and courage in the midst of war, an America that stares into the future confident and unafraid. It’s an America that doesn’t exist anymore; we’ve become instead the fist-pounders belting out our nationalism, bullying the world, and using the tools of state to shut down resistance (the next scene in the movie). I wish we liberals were playing the part of Yvonne, that we were the resistance. But we’re not. We don’t have her tears. We don’t have her courage. We don’t have her passion. We don’t have her voice. We certainly don’t have her acting ability. Nor are we the tough idealist that is Rick, the courageous Nazi antagonist that is Victor (who can’t contain his outrage over even a bar song), or even the cynical yet patriotic French policeman, Captain Renault with his bemused smile and peccadillos.
Instead, I watched American Graffiti. The actors, the cars, the street scenes, the dialog, it’s the America I grew up in; it’s who we used to be. The questions the movie wrestles with are the pretty questions of youth; what should we do tonight, who’s dating who, whose car is faster, college or no, where do we get some booze; all with Wolfman Jack as our narrator and conscience over a playlist that includes Only You, Party Doll, Peppermint Twist, At the Hop, The book of Love, Do You Want to Dance, Why do Fools Fall In Love, Goodnight, Well It’s Time to Go, and all the rest. The fights and wrecked cars, the money stolen from the pinball machines, the teenage stunt that wrecked a police car resolve themselves quickly and neatly and don’t derail the narrative; they are instead absorbed as the unremarkable antics of American youth. It’s a movie about confidence and identity. The answers to the existential questions are unstated and obvious. In 1962, American young people knew who they were and where they were going. We believed in America.
* * * *
Morocco is the most honest place I’ve ever been. Many years ago, it gave me a dozen stitches and a broken arm. There are few things more honest than a broken arm. I likely killed one of my assailants. That was honest, too. I think killing someone is probably as honest as you can be.
We liberals need to be honest about violence. The cliché that the mighty pen bests the sword is a lie repeated by people with big vocabularies just before tucking into a hearty dinner. They are people who lecture us with tired and unoriginal arguments that have kept them safe and comfortable and achieved nothing for the rest of us. Honesty is recognizing the value that violence has wrought. Wars, strikes, vandalism, fire bombs, riots, assault and broken windows cause change. Little else does. Certainly not clever hands on the keys; our liberal elite craft books, letters and stern editorials from their comfortable hearths and cause nothing, change nothing.
There is no joy in broken glass or burning buildings. There is no joy in stitches, fractured bones or death, but there is the satisfaction of having been honest, of being acknowledged, of causing people to think about you, your life, your wellbeing, of knowing that your hunger is not without recourse, not without purpose. Admittedly, there is a passion to violence, a physical and spiritual lust, the deep satisfaction that comes from settling a score, of showing people with power what true power is; the power of material destruction, the power of bodily injury, the power of death.
For a liberal to call for violence is out of character. The liberal credo is much like the Hippocratic oath; “First, do no harm.” Except that the Hippocratic oath doesn’t say that (ironically, the Hippocratic Oath does forbid abortion, but that’s not this conversation). Likewise, we liberals should look at our beliefs and our history and ask ourselves, why is violence off the table? We every day accept violence brought by the society around us, the violence of poverty, the violence of poor education, the violence of inaccessible health care, the violence of bigotry and stigma, the violence of a failing climate, the violence of law enforcement, the violence of unjust incarceration. Why is this state-sponsored violence, which has caused the misery and early deaths of so many for so long, so acceptable? And why is a violent response so taboo?
There is no power in stewing and chewing the gnawed bones discarded by the wealthy. The power’s in the taking, in the wresting of wellbeing from those who would not give it freely; the power’s in causing the wealthy to reflect on the thin and delicate branch of their perch. It’s in acknowledging that there is such a thing as wellbeing and that we are all due wellbeing; we are all due food, a roof, a bed, a doctor, a teacher, an opportunity to celebrate the fact of our being.
The pursuit of wealth beyond wellbeing is a fool’s errand. It’s a pursuit for people who don’t comprehend the marvel of life, nor its brevity, nor their unearned good fortune in living it. These are people without the intellectual capacity or sense of irony to recognize life for the remarkable moment that it is. These are people without empathy, people who mistake owning for success. That their eighty years of life, never to be repeated, will be best observed through the crap they surround themselves with; toys, mansions, sycophants and genuflecting politicians. They’re dupes and fools, the bunch of them. But the wealth they’re taking is yours and mine, it’s our wellbeing. We need them to stop. And they won’t stop by asking them nicely.
I was thinking. Life is only experience, it has a beginning and an end and each day as we live toward death, we decide whether to expand or contract our experience. There is no overcoming it, we die, we all die; no matter how undeserving we imagine a person to be, no matter how undeserving we imagine ourselves to be; we all end up dead. The fact that we, you and I, exist is a mathematical impossibility; 750,000,000 years ago, an amoeba fucked an amoeba to propagate our genes for another generation and so on through the millennia. If they hadn’t fucked, you and I wouldn’t be. You and I will never happen again. We only exist because of luck, blind, stupid, arbitrary luck, luck we had nothing to do with. Three, ten, twenty, ninety years of consciousness is all we get; one day, we will all die tomorrow. And to spend this existential moment, this spark of existence on a time scale that measures our human years with dozens of zeros, pursuing material and social appurtenance beyond well-being is so shallow, so daft, so beneath our intelligence, so unworthy of the random good fortune we all bear and that will soon be over to never occur again, regardless the zeros. Experience your life.
Yesterday I promised I was going home and that I’d leave you alone.
My apologies but before I do, I want to talk about Ursula again. (I wrote about her a few days ago, the post is still up.) A friend messaged me and asked me if I liked her. He shouldn’t have had to ask. That he did is my fault. My bad writing. I wanted readers to like her. I like her very much. More than that, I admire her.
Ursula is not a victim but she is a sympathetic character. Her father abandoned her when she was in high school, married her off when she was sixteen. The first marriage went bad and she kept trying. In her third marriage, she was physically beaten. Using nothing but wits and grit (those quintessential American values we all pride ourselves on), she’s assembled an enviable life, a life of tranquility and peace surrounded by the animals she loves and trusts in a beautiful place. Finally, she’s safe.
She’s a born-again Christian and has those insufferable beliefs. But why wouldn’t she? The Christian right has aggressively courted her. They’ve given her difficult life context, a belief system, they’ve made her important. What have we, the liberal left, done for her? We’ve been failing for decades, abortion is irrelevant to her life and we lost that one anyway. Guns, she’s a woman who lives alone in the country, she has guns. Minimum wage, we haven’t touched that since what, 2007? What good have we done Ursula?
We don’t even talk to her. Remember, we’re democrats, we’re the “professional class” (thank you Bill and Hillary). Too bad there are not enough of us “professionals” to win elections. But no, Ursula is not our type and we’re going to criticize and belittle her until it’s we who are no longer relevant. Because Ursula is much of America today. She’s looking for a belief system because she needs one (we all need one). And because we on the left failed to provide one, she looked elsewhere. And we have the gall to call her a hypocrite for taking a few dollars a month in disability? That’s the least she deserves. After all, it’s we who abandoned her.
In our condescension, we imagine ourselves to be the intellectual elite, the smart people calling the shots and charting direction for the good of the little people. And the little people are sick of it. Because we’re not good at it. We don’t honor them or value them or, as I wrote above, even talk to them. We don’t provide aspiration and vision, we don’t project optimism and hope, we don’t paint a picture of a better tomorrow. And worst of all, we don’t deliver on whatever modest aspirations we do articulate. We’re losers. And nobody wants to be associated with losers, no matter how smart we imagine ourselves to be.
Reconsider your thoughts on Ursula. I’ll try to be a better writer.
Headed home. Before I do, I want to talk about my motorcycle, the Revival.
The Revival is a 2021 Harley Davidson motorcycle, a remake of the iconic 1969 Electra Glide, the classic Hog. Harley Davidson made 1500 of these bikes. Mine is number 1307, Lucky 13.
It’s a horrible touring motorcycle, it’s astonishing how bad it is. The seating position is that of an old-fashioned wooden school desk; feet flat, back straight, 90-degree angles at hips and knees. The impact of any and every pothole, expansion joint and lousy bit of asphalt is transmitted directly up your spine. And because your feet are forward of your hips, you can’t use your legs to protect your back. Bumps hurt.
It weighs 864 pounds. (roughly twice the weight of my BMW touring bike). Maneuvering the bike in and out of Waffle House parking lots and around gas pumps is risky and slow (and they’ve got those big plate glass windows at Waffle House so you’ve got an audience). And you can’t get off and push it around, as I routinely do with other motorcycles, because once that 864 pounds starts to shift from vertical, it gets heavy fast and you want a leg on either side to catch it.
It handles like the hog that it is; as you set up for a turn — freeway on-ramp, one of Tail of the Dragon’s 318 curves, whatever — you’re on the brakes early because slowing down takes a while, it tips into the turn slowly and reluctantly and waddles you up to the apex. As you pass the apex and try to straighten the bike up, it resists the pull on the bars and you struggle with it, you struggle until the double yellow line and oncoming traffic are getting uncomfortably close and the bike is again vertical, you then exhale and start getting ready for the next one. It’s got very little ground clearance, so you can’t lean it very far without dragging hard parts on the pavement.
It has 97 horsepower. For an 864-pound modern motorcycle, that’s way, way, way underpowered.
The Revival is the best touring bike I’ve ever owned. By far. It represents America at one of its finest hours, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Civil Rights, color TVs in walnut cabinets, shag carpeting. It’s good union jobs and a livable minimum wage. It’s the Camaro, the Mustang and the Coupe DeVille with white wall tires. It’s Janis, Grace, Jimi and John Fogerty. It’s Nixon before most people knew he was Nixon. Sure, we had Viet Nam, but the tide was turning and Walter Cronkite was on it. The Japanese motorcycle invasion had started but we didn’t know it, all we knew about Japan was that we’d beaten them in The War. America sat astride the Harley Davidson Electra Glide and the world with pride.
Fifty years later, people of America love the Electra Glide’s revival, the color, the lines, the stature, the heft, the Americanness of it. It can’t be defined by numbers or feel at the handlebars and butt, it’s defined by the woman in the parking lot who wants a picture, the black kid on the horse, the Iraqi immigrant, the woman with the prosthetic leg. The Revival is flawed and ridiculous and it’s us. And everyone wants to talk about it. And about themselves. Wandering these United States talking to people and retelling their stories, the Revival is perfect. The Revival is a celebration of us…
Two nights ago, I slept at Ursula’s house in Niota, Tennessee.
Ursula is a friend of a friend, she’s fifty-one, a thrice divorced born-again Christian who rides a Harley and has a prosthetic leg, she lost the leg in a motorcycle accident nine years ago. She breeds and raises birds; chickens, ducks, quail, song birds; pretty birds in an enormous variety of sizes, colors and plumage that strut and peck and cluck around her big fenced backyard. She’s also got three small dogs and a son who lives in Chicago.
Her first marriage was to a Navy man when she was 16. Her father was career Navy, divorced, and reassigned to Guam. She was going into her senior year in high school, she married so that she could stay in the States and finish school. They had her son. Her divorce two years ago was from a psychopath who beat her. I asked her about relationships, she adamantly has no interest.
Ursula
Ursula’s birds all have names and personalities that she describes with annoyance and affection. They come when she calls, they sit in her lap, take food from her hand, follow her around the yard. Lucky sits on her shoulder as she does chores. Her love is obvious, her conversations about them have the intelligence, confidence and syllables of science.
More beer and some colorado and our conversation changed from ducks to people. The sky is black, the stars bright, she’s got tiny lights strung on the coops and cages that twinkle, the air has cooled and has a soft touch. We argued about the nature of humans. I told her about friend of mine, Ron, who a few winters ago got a job as a union roofer. Ron was homeless, he didn’t have a vehicle or vehicle insurance or cold weather clothing or the most basic tools or money for lunch. And his cellphone was failing. But the job paid well and I lent him money and sold him an old company truck on credit. (Ron was killed a couple of years later by St. Paul Police.)
She argued that the help I gave Ron was crippling, that he needed to make his own way, that the lord placed a premium on personal endeavor, that any help, particularly government help, creates dependency and weakness. Ursula was defending her god. I’m an atheist.
Our argument approached vitriol and I began to worry about where I was going to spend the night. I was tired and I’d been drinking and I really didn’t want to get back on the motorcycle. Also, this is supposed to be a listening tour. I started talking about the beauty of the night sky and the colored lights on the cages, a change of subject she accepted without hesitation, and we went back to talking about birds and motorcycles. For breakfast, we shared an Amish-grown cantaloupe. The birds got the rinds.
Ursula receives SSI disability payments for her leg.
